Ian Fleming's "Last" Interview
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In October 1963 Ian Fleming was interviewed by Roy Newquist for a publication called Counterpoint. The interview was subsequently billed as Fleming's last, though it isn't. That honor might go to the notorious Daily Express interview from January 2, 1964, where Fleming said "Bond is Scottish on both sides, and I intend to prove it in my next book."
Anyway, this interview is hardly revelatory, but makes for enjoyable reading.
***
Ian Fleming
N. In 1952 James Bond was born--full-grown, suave, dashing, with a taste for fine food, women, and liquor. Since then he has become a giant in the world of contemporary letters, changing little from the day of his spectacular birth, though claiming an ever-widening audience. Perhaps no single character in the loosely-defined area of the suspense novel has captured a market so boldly and held it with such consistency. (Sherlock Holmes is the only counterpart that springs to mind, but he was a sleuth, not an adventurer, and we never did really know whether or not Mr. Holmes ate, drank, or bedded down.)
In speaking to Ian Fleming, the creator of the fabulous James Bond, the first natural question would be the origin of Mr. Bond. Who is he?
Fleming: Well, he's almost entirely a product of the imagination, though I've used various people I knew during the war, spies and commandos and even newsmen, because I was working in Naval Intelligence and came across unusual characters quite a lot. By "unusual" I mean people who really dealt in or with espionage, which is a bizarre world of its own, far away from any norm.
Now, I didn't want Bond to be a glamorous figure at all. I merely sought to create an interesting man to whom extraordinary things happen, but I didn’t want him to be a paragon, a freak of quality. This is why I chose the very dull name “James Bond.” When you think of it, it is a dull name. (I could have called him Peregrine Caruthers or Trevor Carr, something exciting or romantic.)
The name I borrowed, without his approval, from a very famous American ornithologist named James Bond who wrote Birds Of the West Indies. This book is one of my bibles when I am out in Jamaica, where I write every year, and it occurred to me that it was a properly anonymous name for my hero.
Now, you’ll notice that the James Bond of the first book was a straightforward man who didn’t really possess a total personality. In fact, in the first several books you’ll find absolutely no discussion of his character, few of his mannerisms, no character study in depth. The closest to this comes when the Russian Secret Service, the KGB, scrutinizes him rather closely in From Russia, With Love. But I kept him quite blank, in a way, at first, giving him no quirks, no particular morality or immorality, not even a definite detailed personal appearance.
As the series has gone on, however, James Bond has become encrusted with mannerisms and belongings and individual characteristics. This is probably a natural outgrowth of getting to know him better. I don’t know if this is good or bad, and I don’t know where all the elements that compose Bond come from, but there they are.
N. Do you think you’ve put any of your own personality into him?
Fleming: I couldn’t possibly be James Bond. First of all, he’s got much more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome and he eats rather more richly than I could possibly manage to do. As to quirks and tastes, likes and dislikes, bits of me probably creep in. But not important bits.
N. The only real criticism of your books that I’ve come across made some reference to the fact that “James Bond novels are studies in sex, snobbery, and sadism.”
Fleming: I don’t think they are studies in anything, not even in those quite proper ingredients of a thriller. Sex, of course, enters all interesting books and all interesting lives. As to snobbery, I wonder how much it isn’t a very common motivation, perhaps a spur. Wouldn’t all of us like to eat better, stay in better hotels, drive faster motor-cars, write better books? James Bond is lucky; his life is both cushioned and exciting. As for sadism--frankly, the old-fashioned way of beating spies with baseball bats and truncheons became obsolete during the last war. It’s quite permissible to give them a rougher time than we did in more gentlemanly days. But as to “studies in sex, snobbery, and sadism,” I’m certain they are nothing I attempt, want to attempt, or could do properly should I attempt them.
N. In considering both the character of James Bond, and the general pace of your novels, can you think of any writers who have influenced you?
Fleming: Two splendid American writers, the great masters of the modern thriller, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I was influenced by these writers, by their extremely good style and the breadth and ingeniousness of their stories. 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. Perhaps they played an important part.
N. In creating the situations in which Bond finds himself, do you pay a great deal of attention to the authenticity of background?
Fleming: Yes, I do. I don’t think I’ve ever written about a part of the world which I myself haven’t visited. But you see, I was a reporter for a long time. I have a reporter’s eye and sense of locality, and I add to this by taking notes and buying road maps wherever I happen to be.
N. Could you describe the ascent of James Bond on bestseller lists?
Fleming: I’m still puzzled as to why and how it happened, but the sales of the books go progressively upward. They’ve taken a sudden leap in the past two years in both England and America, but that’s partly due to the first film being made and released, now followed by the second. The paperback publishers have taken advantage of the films to increase their prints. I see that my total American sales now exceed eight million, and in England about seven million. But I’m still very much surprised that an Englishman should have been chosen by the Americans as a popular hero. It doesn’t often happen.
N. I think there are a few twists that make James Bond seem very American. Likes and dislikes, brand of cigarettes, and his rather full sex life.
Fleming: There is some American detail. Of course, three or four of the books are set in and around America, and there’s a subsidiary hero, an American named Felix Leiter who’s with the CIA and later with a detective agency.
But I do get into trouble with my Americanisms. People write in and say I’ve got things wrong here and there. Recently, in fact, I got an assistant librarian at Yale who passes on all my American scenes. I give him the book, and he very kindly goes through it and suggests where the American language could be improved. So I try to catch everything, but still--well, it annoys me as much as it must annoy Americans to find America so clumsily depicted in English books. Similarly, the English are annoyed by mistakes Americans make about England. As an author, one should try to get the lingo totally correct. This applies most strongly to the gangster idiom (of which we have an exaggerated idea, perhaps largely due to Damon Runyon). Gangster language changes with the times, just like beat language, and it’s very difficult, if one isn’t living in America, to keep up with it. But I try my best, and I’m pleased to find that too many Americans don’t complain.
N. I still have a feeling that throughout your stories you use Bond, or other characters, to take verbal potshots at certain people or institutions you, as a person, have negative feelings about. Are you aware of this?
Fleming: Oh yes, I take potshots at a lot of things, including American food, which I find frozen to tastelessness, and Swiss ethics, which are very strange indeed. I often let a subsidiary character express my prejudice or quirk. And I unashamedly rag on the Russians. They are still up to their old tricks. Not too long ago we had that big spy case in Stuttgart in West Germany where a Russian assassin, sent by their Secret Service, confessed to the murder of at least two West Germans with liquid cyanide. The cyanide was fired, from water pistols, into the faces of men who were going upstairs. When they fell dead immediately--and cyanide is quick--no traces of it were found on them, and the verdict in both cases was “heart failure.” As long as the Russians keep on with that sort of thing I’ll have to go on ragging them about it. I think it would be a wonderful thing if we turned off the whole espionage heat. We’d save a lot of money. But that’s neither here nor there.
N. Do you think you’ll ever tire of James Bond?
Fleming: Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of tiring of James Bond. It’s a question of running out of inventiveness. One can’t go on forever having blondes and guns and so forth in the same old mixture. I do try to find a different milieu for each story and a very different plot. I hate the idea of short-weighting my public by giving them the same jazz all over again. In fact, I’d be too damn bored to write it myself.
Somerset Maugham, who is a great friend of mine, once said: “I’m amused by your stories, but your great trouble will be in running out of invention.” I think that’s probably correct, so how long it will keep going I just don’t know. When I feel the situation slipping, I’ll simply stop writing James Bond stories.
N. Last year -- in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service -- I finally became annoyed with your disposal of a heroine I liked. Bond actually married her, then pffht -- she was dead. How important is his bachelorhood?
Fleming: Well, James Bond couldn’t really be married. I can’t have him settling down. His wife would be irritated with his constantly going abroad, she’d want to change his way of life and all his friends, and Bond would worry about the measles epidemic back home and his own faithfulness and -- no, it can’t be done.
This same problem faced Raymond Chandler. In the last book he started to write, just before he died, he was going to have Marlowe marry a French countess. Well, he was very amusing when he told me about this, about how it really would be the end of Marlowe because she’d change all his habits and friends, he’d take to the bottle, and between her wealth and his faults the personality of Marlowe would be quashed. So in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service I took the easy way out. Tracy is no more.
N. To turn away from James Bond for a bit. Your career obviously started long before James Bond took it over. Could you outline it?
Fleming: Eton and Sandhurst make up the early part, and then I went into Reuters, the international news agency, and had a great deal of fun there for three or four years. Then I went into the City to try and make some money, but I wasn’t very good at just plain making money. The city of London is a wonderful club to belong to, but it’s altogether too diverting.
I went back to Moscow, where I had worked for Reuters, but now with the Times of London. From there I was more or less drafted into Naval Intelligence, as they wanted somebody with languages and some knowledge of the city, though my choice because of Sandhurst would have been the Army. I was stuck there throughout the war, personal assistant to director of Naval Intelligence, until I was demobilized. Then Lord Kemsley, who owned The Sunday Times, and a very long string of provincial newspapers, asked me to come along and organize his foreign service. This was great fun, and I was at it until about two years ago -- Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times was the title. I’m still on the editorial board, but journalism is now completely subsidiary to running the Bond factory.
N. You’ve more or less incorporated, haven’t you?
Fleming: I’ve had to. I am a company, and it’s perfectly legitimate, but it’s the only way to keep all ends straight and to save from money from the tax people. However, I am British, and proud of being British, and I’m not going to dodge fair payment by making a dash for Switzerland or one of the other tax paradises. I’ll continue to divide my time between England and Jamaica and save a bit less. But even if the tax thing wasn’t in the picture, I’d have to have a company. There are always too many Bond projects at hand.
N. In the realm of theory, when you’re writing the Bond stories, do you feel any definite obligation to the hero you’ve created, the situations you employ, the public for which you’re writing?
Fleming: I think I find more of an obligation to myself. I write the sort of books that I, personally, would like to read if somebody else would write them for me. They are the type of books that while away the time on an airplane journey, when one is ill in bed, and do away with boredom, or worry.
I set out to entertain and stimulate the reader through all his senses, right down to the taste buds. In most books, you know, the hero has a meal, but you never know what he eats and how much he enjoyed it. In English detective stories people are forever drinking cups of tea or pints of beer and that’s the end of it. It has amused me to put together good food and things I happen to like myself and have James Bond eat them for me.
As far as locations and logic are concerned, I think we have discussed these before. I try to make everything credible, as related to what I know about the rather improbable world of espionage and the parts of the world I’ve visited. A glaring inaccuracy, or a stretching of plausibility, would bother me more than it would any reader.
N. Again, theory: What advice would you give the talented youngster who is seriously concerned with making a career of writing?
Fleming: Well, I would tell him to write more or less as he speaks. To try to get an accurate ear for the spoken word and not, so to speak, put on a top hat when he sits down at his typewriter. He must not think that literature has to be literary. I talked over this very subject with Georges Simenon not too long ago, and he made the same point -- not that we should write in a less literate manner, but that we should avoid pretentiousness. This may be an oversimplification, but I’d tell the youngster to learn to type well and to avoid literary myths.
N. In looking at literature and theater at the moment, what do you find that you most admire, and what do you most deplore?
Fleming: I’ve gotten very tired of this “kitchen sink” period. In fact, the boiled cabbage school bores me to tears. It isn’t necessary to wallow in filth to know what filth is. Things go altogether too far when filth is viewed as beauty and obscenity becomes accepted communication. The world is drab enough, and sometimes horrifying enough, without having this desolation monopolize our theater, books, and films.
I’m even old fashioned enough to disagree with the findings of the Lady Chatterly case. I think it would have been much better not to push that work out into the world, though I dare say the world will digest it and get used to it as it’s absorbed Miller’s erotic excursions to the tropics. We’ll take any four-letter word without a flinch, and I suppose that those words will ultimately lose their shock, then their meaning. I think that they rather strike an attitude on the page, however, and I refuse to use them.
On the other hand I’m glad to see a return to romantic writing -- at least a swing toward it. The story with a beginning, a middle, and an end seems to be returning to favor, and this should be good for everyone.
Anyway, this interview is hardly revelatory, but makes for enjoyable reading.
***
Ian Fleming
N. In 1952 James Bond was born--full-grown, suave, dashing, with a taste for fine food, women, and liquor. Since then he has become a giant in the world of contemporary letters, changing little from the day of his spectacular birth, though claiming an ever-widening audience. Perhaps no single character in the loosely-defined area of the suspense novel has captured a market so boldly and held it with such consistency. (Sherlock Holmes is the only counterpart that springs to mind, but he was a sleuth, not an adventurer, and we never did really know whether or not Mr. Holmes ate, drank, or bedded down.)
In speaking to Ian Fleming, the creator of the fabulous James Bond, the first natural question would be the origin of Mr. Bond. Who is he?
Fleming: Well, he's almost entirely a product of the imagination, though I've used various people I knew during the war, spies and commandos and even newsmen, because I was working in Naval Intelligence and came across unusual characters quite a lot. By "unusual" I mean people who really dealt in or with espionage, which is a bizarre world of its own, far away from any norm.
Now, I didn't want Bond to be a glamorous figure at all. I merely sought to create an interesting man to whom extraordinary things happen, but I didn’t want him to be a paragon, a freak of quality. This is why I chose the very dull name “James Bond.” When you think of it, it is a dull name. (I could have called him Peregrine Caruthers or Trevor Carr, something exciting or romantic.)
The name I borrowed, without his approval, from a very famous American ornithologist named James Bond who wrote Birds Of the West Indies. This book is one of my bibles when I am out in Jamaica, where I write every year, and it occurred to me that it was a properly anonymous name for my hero.
Now, you’ll notice that the James Bond of the first book was a straightforward man who didn’t really possess a total personality. In fact, in the first several books you’ll find absolutely no discussion of his character, few of his mannerisms, no character study in depth. The closest to this comes when the Russian Secret Service, the KGB, scrutinizes him rather closely in From Russia, With Love. But I kept him quite blank, in a way, at first, giving him no quirks, no particular morality or immorality, not even a definite detailed personal appearance.
As the series has gone on, however, James Bond has become encrusted with mannerisms and belongings and individual characteristics. This is probably a natural outgrowth of getting to know him better. I don’t know if this is good or bad, and I don’t know where all the elements that compose Bond come from, but there they are.
N. Do you think you’ve put any of your own personality into him?
Fleming: I couldn’t possibly be James Bond. First of all, he’s got much more guts than I have. He’s also considerably more handsome and he eats rather more richly than I could possibly manage to do. As to quirks and tastes, likes and dislikes, bits of me probably creep in. But not important bits.
N. The only real criticism of your books that I’ve come across made some reference to the fact that “James Bond novels are studies in sex, snobbery, and sadism.”
Fleming: I don’t think they are studies in anything, not even in those quite proper ingredients of a thriller. Sex, of course, enters all interesting books and all interesting lives. As to snobbery, I wonder how much it isn’t a very common motivation, perhaps a spur. Wouldn’t all of us like to eat better, stay in better hotels, drive faster motor-cars, write better books? James Bond is lucky; his life is both cushioned and exciting. As for sadism--frankly, the old-fashioned way of beating spies with baseball bats and truncheons became obsolete during the last war. It’s quite permissible to give them a rougher time than we did in more gentlemanly days. But as to “studies in sex, snobbery, and sadism,” I’m certain they are nothing I attempt, want to attempt, or could do properly should I attempt them.
N. In considering both the character of James Bond, and the general pace of your novels, can you think of any writers who have influenced you?
Fleming: Two splendid American writers, the great masters of the modern thriller, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I was influenced by these writers, by their extremely good style and the breadth and ingeniousness of their stories. 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. Perhaps they played an important part.
N. In creating the situations in which Bond finds himself, do you pay a great deal of attention to the authenticity of background?
Fleming: Yes, I do. I don’t think I’ve ever written about a part of the world which I myself haven’t visited. But you see, I was a reporter for a long time. I have a reporter’s eye and sense of locality, and I add to this by taking notes and buying road maps wherever I happen to be.
N. Could you describe the ascent of James Bond on bestseller lists?
Fleming: I’m still puzzled as to why and how it happened, but the sales of the books go progressively upward. They’ve taken a sudden leap in the past two years in both England and America, but that’s partly due to the first film being made and released, now followed by the second. The paperback publishers have taken advantage of the films to increase their prints. I see that my total American sales now exceed eight million, and in England about seven million. But I’m still very much surprised that an Englishman should have been chosen by the Americans as a popular hero. It doesn’t often happen.
N. I think there are a few twists that make James Bond seem very American. Likes and dislikes, brand of cigarettes, and his rather full sex life.
Fleming: There is some American detail. Of course, three or four of the books are set in and around America, and there’s a subsidiary hero, an American named Felix Leiter who’s with the CIA and later with a detective agency.
But I do get into trouble with my Americanisms. People write in and say I’ve got things wrong here and there. Recently, in fact, I got an assistant librarian at Yale who passes on all my American scenes. I give him the book, and he very kindly goes through it and suggests where the American language could be improved. So I try to catch everything, but still--well, it annoys me as much as it must annoy Americans to find America so clumsily depicted in English books. Similarly, the English are annoyed by mistakes Americans make about England. As an author, one should try to get the lingo totally correct. This applies most strongly to the gangster idiom (of which we have an exaggerated idea, perhaps largely due to Damon Runyon). Gangster language changes with the times, just like beat language, and it’s very difficult, if one isn’t living in America, to keep up with it. But I try my best, and I’m pleased to find that too many Americans don’t complain.
N. I still have a feeling that throughout your stories you use Bond, or other characters, to take verbal potshots at certain people or institutions you, as a person, have negative feelings about. Are you aware of this?
Fleming: Oh yes, I take potshots at a lot of things, including American food, which I find frozen to tastelessness, and Swiss ethics, which are very strange indeed. I often let a subsidiary character express my prejudice or quirk. And I unashamedly rag on the Russians. They are still up to their old tricks. Not too long ago we had that big spy case in Stuttgart in West Germany where a Russian assassin, sent by their Secret Service, confessed to the murder of at least two West Germans with liquid cyanide. The cyanide was fired, from water pistols, into the faces of men who were going upstairs. When they fell dead immediately--and cyanide is quick--no traces of it were found on them, and the verdict in both cases was “heart failure.” As long as the Russians keep on with that sort of thing I’ll have to go on ragging them about it. I think it would be a wonderful thing if we turned off the whole espionage heat. We’d save a lot of money. But that’s neither here nor there.
N. Do you think you’ll ever tire of James Bond?
Fleming: Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of tiring of James Bond. It’s a question of running out of inventiveness. One can’t go on forever having blondes and guns and so forth in the same old mixture. I do try to find a different milieu for each story and a very different plot. I hate the idea of short-weighting my public by giving them the same jazz all over again. In fact, I’d be too damn bored to write it myself.
Somerset Maugham, who is a great friend of mine, once said: “I’m amused by your stories, but your great trouble will be in running out of invention.” I think that’s probably correct, so how long it will keep going I just don’t know. When I feel the situation slipping, I’ll simply stop writing James Bond stories.
N. Last year -- in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service -- I finally became annoyed with your disposal of a heroine I liked. Bond actually married her, then pffht -- she was dead. How important is his bachelorhood?
Fleming: Well, James Bond couldn’t really be married. I can’t have him settling down. His wife would be irritated with his constantly going abroad, she’d want to change his way of life and all his friends, and Bond would worry about the measles epidemic back home and his own faithfulness and -- no, it can’t be done.
This same problem faced Raymond Chandler. In the last book he started to write, just before he died, he was going to have Marlowe marry a French countess. Well, he was very amusing when he told me about this, about how it really would be the end of Marlowe because she’d change all his habits and friends, he’d take to the bottle, and between her wealth and his faults the personality of Marlowe would be quashed. So in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service I took the easy way out. Tracy is no more.
N. To turn away from James Bond for a bit. Your career obviously started long before James Bond took it over. Could you outline it?
Fleming: Eton and Sandhurst make up the early part, and then I went into Reuters, the international news agency, and had a great deal of fun there for three or four years. Then I went into the City to try and make some money, but I wasn’t very good at just plain making money. The city of London is a wonderful club to belong to, but it’s altogether too diverting.
I went back to Moscow, where I had worked for Reuters, but now with the Times of London. From there I was more or less drafted into Naval Intelligence, as they wanted somebody with languages and some knowledge of the city, though my choice because of Sandhurst would have been the Army. I was stuck there throughout the war, personal assistant to director of Naval Intelligence, until I was demobilized. Then Lord Kemsley, who owned The Sunday Times, and a very long string of provincial newspapers, asked me to come along and organize his foreign service. This was great fun, and I was at it until about two years ago -- Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times was the title. I’m still on the editorial board, but journalism is now completely subsidiary to running the Bond factory.
N. You’ve more or less incorporated, haven’t you?
Fleming: I’ve had to. I am a company, and it’s perfectly legitimate, but it’s the only way to keep all ends straight and to save from money from the tax people. However, I am British, and proud of being British, and I’m not going to dodge fair payment by making a dash for Switzerland or one of the other tax paradises. I’ll continue to divide my time between England and Jamaica and save a bit less. But even if the tax thing wasn’t in the picture, I’d have to have a company. There are always too many Bond projects at hand.
N. In the realm of theory, when you’re writing the Bond stories, do you feel any definite obligation to the hero you’ve created, the situations you employ, the public for which you’re writing?
Fleming: I think I find more of an obligation to myself. I write the sort of books that I, personally, would like to read if somebody else would write them for me. They are the type of books that while away the time on an airplane journey, when one is ill in bed, and do away with boredom, or worry.
I set out to entertain and stimulate the reader through all his senses, right down to the taste buds. In most books, you know, the hero has a meal, but you never know what he eats and how much he enjoyed it. In English detective stories people are forever drinking cups of tea or pints of beer and that’s the end of it. It has amused me to put together good food and things I happen to like myself and have James Bond eat them for me.
As far as locations and logic are concerned, I think we have discussed these before. I try to make everything credible, as related to what I know about the rather improbable world of espionage and the parts of the world I’ve visited. A glaring inaccuracy, or a stretching of plausibility, would bother me more than it would any reader.
N. Again, theory: What advice would you give the talented youngster who is seriously concerned with making a career of writing?
Fleming: Well, I would tell him to write more or less as he speaks. To try to get an accurate ear for the spoken word and not, so to speak, put on a top hat when he sits down at his typewriter. He must not think that literature has to be literary. I talked over this very subject with Georges Simenon not too long ago, and he made the same point -- not that we should write in a less literate manner, but that we should avoid pretentiousness. This may be an oversimplification, but I’d tell the youngster to learn to type well and to avoid literary myths.
N. In looking at literature and theater at the moment, what do you find that you most admire, and what do you most deplore?
Fleming: I’ve gotten very tired of this “kitchen sink” period. In fact, the boiled cabbage school bores me to tears. It isn’t necessary to wallow in filth to know what filth is. Things go altogether too far when filth is viewed as beauty and obscenity becomes accepted communication. The world is drab enough, and sometimes horrifying enough, without having this desolation monopolize our theater, books, and films.
I’m even old fashioned enough to disagree with the findings of the Lady Chatterly case. I think it would have been much better not to push that work out into the world, though I dare say the world will digest it and get used to it as it’s absorbed Miller’s erotic excursions to the tropics. We’ll take any four-letter word without a flinch, and I suppose that those words will ultimately lose their shock, then their meaning. I think that they rather strike an attitude on the page, however, and I refuse to use them.
On the other hand I’m glad to see a return to romantic writing -- at least a swing toward it. The story with a beginning, a middle, and an end seems to be returning to favor, and this should be good for everyone.
Comments
Thank you for posting this.
I think I was the one who popularised the Fleming Daily Express interview in 2007 with this article (originally published on the CBn Main Page):
http://thebondologistblog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/ian-fleming-on-james-bonds-all-scottish.html
I wrote to the Daily Express in 2010 about this interview but they do not have archives. I then never followed it up but they did provide another address where archive copies of their paper could be bought. Perhaps I should follow it up now?