A good interview that. Fleming reads very naturally in it. There's one paragraph in the middle which reads like a cut & paste from Who's Who, which suggests the journalist wasn't over interested in his subject.
It’s Pistols for Two When Ian Fleming Meets his Latest Rival
By Peter Evans (Daily Express, March 27, 1963)
He selected a cigarette, placed it in his ebony holder and lit it with a gold lighter. It was all done with the studied rhythm of a man playing for time while thinking of exactly what to say.
“I look forward to meeting this fellow,” Ian Fleming said finally, tilting his head towards the ceiling and gently blowing smoke after his words.
With one finger he pushed aside the curtains of the private room over the restaurant not very far from Tottenham Court-road and looked down-into the street.
“Yes, indeed,” he said after another long moment, “It should be a most fascinating encounter. Even perhaps memorable.”
The threat
Indeed. For the missing guest was Mr. Len Deighton, the author whose first spy book, The Ipcress File, has made him the biggest threat to the suave Mr. Fleming and his equally suave hero James Bond since Smersh.
Deighton’s unnamed agent has been snapped up by Bond’s own publishers, Jonathan Cape, and signed by the producers who filmed Doctor No.
What is even more fascinating is that where Mr. Fleming is reputed partly to have modeled Agent 007 on himself, so Deighton’s fumbling, cheapskate hero has more than a touch of his curious creator.
Mr. Fleming, who himself nominated The Ipcress File among the [Sunday Times] Books of the Year, said “I simply have to meet him, you know. It is important to know the kind of fellow you are up against.”
Some fifteen minutes late, Deighton arrived—an untidy man in one or those 1963 suits with the 1957 price tags. He made it look lumpy. On his cuff-units were colour pictures of Littlehampton. He is a man who looks in a perpetual state of surprise.
“This is a bit posh, isn’t it?” he said, shaking Fleming’s hand. “They very nearly didn’t let me in downstairs.”
A silence
Mr. Fleming arranged his face into a bleak smile. “It is rather a pleasant little restaurant,” he said, searching his rival’s face like a map-reader searching for a bearing.
There was the kind of sharp silence that occurs in the first round at a boxing match, when the crowd is waiting for the first punch to be thrown.
Mr. Fleming opened up. “My favourite restaurant is Scotts, actually. Almost got arrested there during the war, as a matter of fact. They suspected I was a German spy. Awfully amusing.
“I was working for [Naval] Intelligence and giving some U-Boat commander a slap-up lunch. The idea was to pump him for information. Cost about £20 and the blighter didn’t talk. Saw right through it obviously,” Fleming admitted pleasantly.
“Anyway, the waiters heard us yapping away in German and in no time we were surrounded by police. I got a most frightful rocket when I got back to my office.”
Deighton’s head began to rock slowly backwards and forwards, as if mesmerised by Mr. Fleming’s story.
“You were in intelligence yourself, weren’t you?” Mr. Fleming put the question across like an angry schoolmaster who has caught one of his pupils dozing.
“Yes. Air Intelligence,” admitted Deighton.
“I guessed as much,” said Mr. Fleming, a look of satisfaction seeping over his face like a blush. “You get pretty near the knuckle in some parts, I must say. Anyway, I realized you knew what you were talking about—as indeed I do.”
The cars
“Your next book,” said Deighton slowly, is set in Japan.”
“Correct,” said Mr. Fleming, his face a mask. “It’s called You Only Live Twice. I’ve just been to Tokyo actually. Ran over on the old willow pattern route. Very jolly. Saki and kimonos and all that damn bowing amuses me enormously. Ever been to Tokyo?”
“Yes,” said Deighton.
“Fly?”
“BOAC,” said Deighton.
“Pleasant?”
“I was a steward,” said Deighton.
Again that circling, first-round silence. “I have a rotten feeling,” Deighton said moodily, “that my car’s going to be towed away.”
“What do you drive, old boy?” asked Mr. Fleming, perhaps sensing a common bond in cars.
“A beaten-up old Volkswagen, actually,” said Deighton, adding brightly, “but I’ve installed a telephone. Yours?”
A joke
“I’ve just got one of those new Studebaker Avantis. Naught to 60 in 4.5 seconds, 175 miles an hour with four passengers up. Supercharged, of course. I must say I adore it,” said Fleming.
Silence. Then: “You know what we should do?" asked Mr. Fleming suddenly. “We should start a running joke in our books. Like those chaps Crosby and Hope. I’ll get Bond to knock your chap—you really should give him a name, you know—and you can get him to tear the hell out of Bond.”
“Super,” said Deighton, “I’d love to knock Bond. You remind me of him in many ways.”
The smile
A thin smile traced across Mr. Fleming’s face. “Really? Well, I do identify myself with him in a few things.”
Mr. Fleming smiled a sad smile. “But of course Bond has a far better digestion than I have, and his prowess with women is considerably greater than mine, unfortunately. Needless to say, he has more guts.”
Deighton asked: “Do you honestly like Bond?”
Mr. Fleming thought about this question for a minute, then: “I began by disliking him intensely. I’ve grown to like him. To be honest, I think your fellow is rather more solid—indeed, Bond is often quite cardboard—but I have put him through so much it would be too disloyal not to like him now.”
It was, as Mr. Fleming predicted, a most fascinating encounter.
Note: Fleming afterward wrote to Raymond Hawkey, who had also attended the meeting: "Thank you also for the amusing photograph of me and Len Deighton. I am sorry to say I thought Evans’ piece was pretty skimpy, but don’t tell him I said so!"
Hawkey, an art college friend of Deighton, had designed the cover for The Ipcress File and went on to design the Pan paperbacks of the Bond series. Fleming acclaimed Hawkey's first Bond cover (for Thunderball) as "really brilliant...I think it is quite splendid and I don't think the filthy little Pan sign spoils it too much."
Fleming did indeed mention Deighton in his contribution to the Sunday Times "Books of the Year" feature (Dec. 23, 1962), though with reservations:
"The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton (Hodder & Stoughton), was a brilliant firework, but rather too 'scatty' for my taste. I don’t think thrillers should be 'funny.'"
In a letter to his close friend William Plomer, dated May 20, 1964, Fleming discussed Deighton's Funeral in Berlin:
"Amusing cracks but I simply can’t be bothered with his kitchen sink writing & all this Nescafe. Reminds me of [John] Bratby. I think Capes should send him to Tahiti or somewhere & get him to ‘tell a story’. He excuses his ignorance of life with his footnotes & that won’t stand up for long –- nice chap though he is."
Deighton worked on the screenplay of From Russia With Love, though it seems his contributions were mostly disregarded. He later collaborated with Kevin McClory and Sean Connery on the script for the unmade Bond film Warhead. In 2012 he published the ebook James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father. I haven't read it, but the Amazon review by John Cork (the Bond expert) suggests the book has some problems.
I agree as well. Evans plays the conversation for comedy, and while it's quite funny to read about the writers' class difference and basic incompatibility, you wonder if more substantial parts of the conversation were left out of the article.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,843MI6 Agent
I remember having a discussion over on CBn years ago where Peter Evans's other Bond related articles came up and I think we came to the conclusion that some of his pieces (such as I think with Simenon meeting Fleming) were rather fabricated. I'm not saying that's the case here but I do remember thinking some of his reporting of the conversations between famous authors was more imagined than real.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
You might be thinking of a different interview, since the Simenon/Fleming meeting (coming up in a few weeks) was conducted by Gordon Young, and appears too long and detailed to be a fabrication. But there's certainly a possibility that the conversations Peter Evans reported were substantially reworked by the time they appeared in print. The Fleming/Deighton interview reads like something from a TV sitcom, though Fleming suggesting they refer to each other's characters in their books is definitely in character--he proposed something similar to Rex Stout and of course mentioned Nero Wolfe in OHMSS.
I didn't realize Deighton was yet another former spy. I thought his background was in graphic design, where he met Hawkey. Seems just about every major spy writer then actually worked in the field. What's the official Secrets Act say about all these spies-turned-authors?
For folks who don't know about Len Deighton, @Barbel created this amazing Harry Palmer thread with lots more information on Deighton as well as the film adaptations.
Here is a photo of Fleming, Deighton and Hawkey together, which might have come from this same lunch(?) March 25, 1963 (photo from 007 Magazine).
By Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1963)
He was seated alone in the Window Room of Scott’s Restaurant in Coventry Street, his long, tapered fingers toying with a glass of white wine to which two teaspoons of water had been added.
“Sit down,” he said, half rising, the terseness of the words tempered by a smile that flickered for a warm second—no more—and was gone. It was obvious he had little time for small talk. After a quick but careful glance around the handsome Edwardian room, he leaned forward to ask the key question. “What will you drink?”
“Martinis,” we said. Swiftly assessing the cryptic word, he summoned a waiter with a commanding flick of his head. “Two martinis, very dry,” he ordered. “Four and 2 quarter parts of Coates’ Plymouth gin to five eighths of a part of Boissiere, the white vermouth. On the rocks. No lemon peel, no onion, no olive. Stir, don't shake.”
He turned his surprisingly blue eyes on us. Cold as sapphires, they shone out from a lean, ruddy face—handsome, if you like—that betrayed a few tell-tale signs of too many late nights at the baccarat table and perhaps more champagne (Taittinger blanc de blancs) than was strictly necessary. His luxuriant close-cropped hair was, I noticed, now completely gray. Again, he bent his supple, six foot frame forward.
“Cigarette?” he asked, offering a dull silver case surmounted by a curious coin. He caught my brief stare. “Gold sovereign,” he said. “My lucky coin at Monte Carlo. Made a killing with it.” The snakelike head of his Ronson Variflame flicked evilly and in a flash his cigarette was lit. As he took a deep drag, the neat polka-dot bow tie bobbed at the collar of his Sea Island cotton shirt with short sleeves.
If the foregoing sounds like a pallid attempt to imitate the style of Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond stories—well, it is. The gentleman, described above, with whom we were taking lunch in the admirable surroundings of Scott’s, was Mr. Fleming, the successor to the Hammetts, the Greenes and the Amblers as the world’s best-selling author of international spy fiction. His hero, James Bond (No. 007 in the British Secret Service), has become a household word in most of our best households, including the one in the White House.
“Actually,” he said over the cold salmon, sliced no more than .007 of an inch thick, “I picked the name of James Bond because it sounded to me like the most commonplace name in the world. I first ran across it in Jamaica—a James Bond was the author of an obscure scientific book I was reading. What an unspeakably dull name, I said to myself. Just a step removed from anonymity. Now the readers think there actually IS a James Bond.”
“Do you know any good villains?” he inquired, flicking an ash off his blue suit (no pocket handkerchief). “Villains are the hardest for me. I was rather fond of Rosa Klebb, but, of course, I had to kill her off. Same with Doctor No.” I mentioned Blofeld, the evil fellow with the syphilitic nose who almost finishes Bond in his newest book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but Mr. Fleming merely shook his head over his lamb chops (pink in the middle).
“I kill off Blofeld in the next book, which I just finished,” he said regretfully. “An excruciating death. And as for Bond, I’ve got him in such a devil of a pickle I don’t know how I’m EVER going to get him out. Poor James.”
In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the dashing Bond, who averages three affairs and an equal number of killings per book, marries a fine girl named Tracy. As they are starting out on their honeymoon in a white Lancia, the unspeakable Blofeld, in a red Maserati, races past and fires at them. At the end of the book, the Lancia has crashed into a field, “and Bond put his arm around her shoulders, across which the dark patches had begun to flower.”
“I hate to ask this,” I said, mindful of previous miraculous recoveries, “but is Tracy REALLY dead?”
Mr. Fleming poured himself a splash of vin ordinaire from a carafe and nodded sorrowfully. “Of course,” he replied. “Blood oozing out the back—sure sign. Too bad, but I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.”
He glanced at the stainless steel Rolex on his left wrist. “Really must go,” he apologized. “Catching a plane for Istanbul, where they’re filming From Russia. With Love. The first picture made from one of my books—Dr. No—has just been released here. Tremendous success. Made all its costs back right away, and I’m happy to say I have a small piece of the action. Sean Connery will play James Bond again—don’t you think he’s a fine Bond?”
We agreed. We had seen a preview of Dr. No and Connery seemed almost as good as the real thing. Mr. Fleming struggled into a luminous blue raincoat and led the way out of Scott’s into the gray London afternoon. As we searched for a cab, he pointed to a second-story corner window of the restaurant. “See that window?” he asked. When James is in London he always lunches there, at the corner table. That’s so he can look down and watch the pretty girls walking past.”
And with that, Ian Fleming—or is HE James Bond?—waved a cheery farewell and strode off into the anonymous crowd.
Note: The legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen was one of Fleming's early American fans and praised the books in his columns. Fleming returned the favor by writing an article, "The Case of the Painfully Pulled Leg," for the Chronicle in praise of Caen. After Fleming's death Caen devoted another column to him—extracts below:
Farewell to Double Nought Seven
By Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1964)
I saw Ian Fleming for the first and last time in London, a little over a year ago. His penultimate [sic] book, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was about to be published and the word was already around that in it, James Bond, the avowed bachelor, had married La Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo, otherwise known as Tracy. “That's true,” smiled Fleming over lunch at Scott’s, “but of course I had to kill her off at the end. Nasty death, on their honeymoon. It wouldn't do at all for James to be married, you understand—a wife would just be in the way. I may have to kill off Bond one of these days, too—before he kills me. Plots are getting harder and harder to come up with.”
[…] I didn't realize how closely he identified with Bond till we got around to a discussion of the movie versions of his books (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and next, Goldfinger). When we agreed that the actor who portrayed M., Bond's chief, was miscast, I suggested “You should play M.—you're about the same age, aren't you?”
Immediately, he looked hurt, and I clammed up. Obviously, he felt he had nothing in common with the aging sea dog who headed the British Secret Service. He gave me a long, cold, ironical look that would have done justice to James Bond.
[…] Spy critics poked fun at Bond's modus operandi—pointing out, for example, that no agent would smoke those special cigarettes with the three gold bands, so easily identifiable. They snickered at Fleming’s penchant for ticking off Bond’s clothing, smoking and drinking habits by brand name, never letting him forget that he misspelled Bond's favorite champagne—Taittinger Blancs de Blanc (he left the “s” off the first “Blancs”).
Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don't they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults.
Another excellent article. I picked up on the Caen / Fleming imitation quickly - was disappointed he didn't run with through the whole interview. While it isn't Fleming's voice, I enjoy Caen's summing up:
Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don't they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults.
Also interesting was Fleming's
I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.
as it seems to hint that far from being bored with his character, as he was around the time of FRWL, or condescending to him [hence TSWLM], Fleming's contemplating many more adventures. Maybe the thrill of competition [eg. Len Deighton from the previous interview] was spurring his inventive sides.
TMWTGG is only a half finished novel and would have benefitted from Fleming's six-months of spit-and-polish, but where we wonder might he have gone from there...?
Richard 'Dikko' Hughes's "Sayonara to James Bond" (in his book Foreign Devil) reveals that Fleming was extremely interested in researching and visiting the Panama Canal. Hughes believes Fleming intended to send Bond there, and only illness got in the way.
Also, a couple years after Ian's death Caspar Fleming became so interested in Egyptology that Ann Fleming accompanied him on a trip to Egypt. Had Ian lived he'd probably have accompanied them and might have accumulated enough material to make Egypt the location of a future Bond novel.
Fleming was also interested in the narcotics trade and tried interesting his publishers in a reference book on drugs (“every guest [at Goldeneye] says ‘what does ganja look like?’"). Marijuana features in TMWTGG and drugs might have played larger roles in future Bond adventures.
Lastly, two of the "Thrilling Cities" Fleming loved most were Hong Kong and Tokyo. He returned to Japan to research YOLT and perhaps would have returned to Hong Kong to research another Bond adventure if he'd lived longer.
Yes, it was just from memory of a discussion I had with others on CBn back in 2005 and we all know how fallible memory can be! I knew I probably wasn't remembering it correctly after 17 years. I seem to remember that my assertion that the Peter Evans stuff might've been partial fabrication came from something I noticed in the footnotes or references in Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987) by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott. That book is rather overly wordy and academic perhaps but there is some good information and analysis within it too, including the sales figures of some of the Bond novels.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Fleming was also interested in the narcotics trade and tried interesting his publishers in a reference book on drugs (“every guest [at Goldeneye] says ‘what does ganja look like?’"). Marijuana features in TMWTGG and drugs might have played larger roles in future Bond adventures.
________________________________
did this proposed book have any connection to The Poppy is Also a Flower? Fleming is credited for "story idea" in that film, how much was he involved and how did he find time?
funny all these guests at Goldeneye asking Fleming about ganja. Purely for educational purposes I'm sure. I wonder of the British PM who stayed there also asked "what does it look like?" "hey Fleming man you got lots of connections, can you score some of that ganja so I can look at it?"
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,843MI6 Agent
edited November 2022
By all accounts the British prime minister in question, Sir Anthony Eden, (served 1955-1957) was on enough dangerous drugs as it was which goes some way to explain his irrational decision making during the Suez Crisis of 1956. His wife Clarissa Eden was a friend of Ann Fleming's and the Edens stayed at Goldeneye to convalese after the fallout from the Suez Crisis which took a toll on Eden's health and led to his resignation as prime minister in January 1957. The Flemings weren't there at the time that they offered it up to the Edens as a place to get away from it all for a while.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
Good question. It looks like "Poppy" and the drugs book were linked concepts. Here's an excerpt from Fleming's letter to Michael Howard of Cape:
Dear Michael,
One sudden, brilliant notion.
I am surrounded by books of reference here – about birds, fish, shells, tropical shrubs, trees, plants, the stars, etc. etc. – but every guest says “what does ganja look like?” (marihuana)
Why not do a cool, well-illustrated book on the “narcotic flora of the world”? Expensive. Definitive. With medical effects, etc. I would certainly underwrite it. You can’t miss. Get cracking before Weidenpuss or Thames & Hudson do it. A £5 job.
I have spoken!
And here's Lycett on the poppy film:
...The Poppy is also a Flower, a film about the global drugs trade which Ian had originally discussed with Terence Young, the director of Dr No and From Russia, With Love. Drawing on his proposal for a narcotics handbook, Ian had talked of a story-line which followed the progress of an opium poppy from a flower in an Iranian field to raw heroin in the streets of New York. After Ian’s death, Young developed the theme with a writer, Joe Eisinger, who presented it to Glidrose as a possible Fleming film. Ian’s executors were unwilling to allow his name to be associated in any promotional capacity, though they were prepared to permit the use of the credit line, “The story is based on an idea by Ian Fleming”. The film, known in Britain as Danger Grows Wild, was released in 1966 with Terence Stamp as the swarthy secret agent in the lead role and Grace Kelly voicing an admonitory introduction on the dangers of drugs.
Though heroin had already made appearances in Fleming's work, it seems evident that he would have returned to the topic.
@Silhouette Man I agree about Bond and Beyond. It's the first proper academic study of the Bond phenomenon and is better written and more incisive than many other academic works, including most of those on Bond. The authors have a baseline of respect for their subject and aren't writing from a position of hostility, unlike several other academics I could name. The Twayne series book on Fleming, for example, is little more than a hit job.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 8,843MI6 Agent
edited November 2022
@Revelator - I agree with your assessment regarding Bond and Beyond. It is a proper academic study of the inexact science of Bondology. I think the ball was started rolling fairly early on with the publication of Kingsley Amis's The James Bond Dossier (1965) though due to Amis's unpretentious nature when it came to genre fiction it was more of a mock-academic study of the literary Bond phenomenon than a fully academic treatment. Still, it did show to all concerned that if a post-war writer of Amis's stature could take the Bond phenomenon seriously and even go on to pen the first Bond continuation novel, Colonel Sun, then others could feel free to study the phenomenon more in-depth too. In my view Amis opened the door to all those who came after him, both in terms of Bond literary criticism and study and the Bond continuation authorship.
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
thanks @Revelator for the background info on The Poppy is also a Flower.
Fleming's proposed book sounds like what we would call an ethnobotanical field guide, except more specialised. Ethnobotanists look at other native uses of plants, but the field seems to be mostly concerned with pharmaceutic potential. Theres big money to be had discovering "new" pharmaceutical drug ingredients deep in the rain forest, and of course amateur enthusiasts are fascinated by the topic as well
Erotic scenes of torture and sex have brought fame to a quiet man who hates all violence
By Geoffrey Bocca (Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1963)
In Doctor No, James Bond finally disposes of the wicked Communist doctor by smothering him in bird droppings. In Moonraker, the villainous Sir Hugo Drax is blown up by his own atom bomb. Oddjob, the torturer in Goldfinger, is last seen oozing out the window of a plane: “As if the Korean’s body was toothpaste, it was slowly sucked with a terrible whistling noise through the aperture.”
These and similar scenes of violence have been responsible for the sale of more than seven million copies of the James Bond stories—11 books in 11 years. Bond is almost essential reading in smart society and on college campuses. President Kennedy, Prince Philip and former CIA chief Allen Dulles are among his fans. Literary magazines acknowledge him as “every intellectual’s favorite Fascist,” and his creator as “the thinking man’s Mickey Spillane.” Parodies abound, and one 70-page paperback called Alligator, published by the Harvard Lampoon, has sold no less than 50,000 copies.
All this uproar naturally delights the tall, handsome, sardonic man who created James Bond. At 55, slowed in his movements by a heart attack two years ago, Ian Fleming has high cheekbones, close-set eyes, a bashed-in nose, and a rich taste for the luxuries of life. Each winter, he retreats from the London whirl and writes a new Bond novel at his beach house in Jamaica. Every afternoon he lies face down in the water, looking at the fish through his faceplate. In his manner he thinks out the plot, and contemplates the trick he has been playing ever since Bond was born.
The trick consists of having led his readers to believe that Fleming has modeled Bond on himself. Like Bond, Fleming is a former naval commander. The creator and his creation share a taste for vodka martinis, custom-made cigarettes, and, until Fleming’s marriage, unattached women. Dust-cover photographs of Fleming with it gun help the illusion. In fact, Fleming has created a character who is the opposite of himself. Bond, Fleming writes in every book, is “cruel.” The essence of Fleming’s personality is his gentleness. He abhors violence.
“I believe one has the right to kill only what one eats and nothing more,” Fleming says. This is scarcely an exaggeration. When Sir Anthony Eden’s health broke down after Suez, he and Lady Eden rented Fleming’s house, “Goldeneye,” at Oracabessa, Jamaica. On their first night there they were horrified to find giant bush rats scuttling around the house. “Commander Fleming does not like them to be killed,” one of the servants explained. “After all, they cannot help being bush rats,” Fleming reflects moodily. As the rats proliferated, however, Fleming was obliged to send local boys after them for the price of sixpence a tail, an execution order that sent him into a deep depression.
Fleming is so softhearted, in fact, that he finds it hard to reject a stranger’s request for money. And when a friend is ill he feels compelled to fill the hospital room with flowers, Fleming also has interests that Bond would scorn. Bond has never read a book, but Fleming is one of England’s principal authorities on rare books. He is publisher of the London Book Collector, perhaps the leading magazine in the world on the subject.
Fleming has an almost infinite number of quirks, prejudices and dislikes. Some are apparent in his form of dress, which he has not changed since he was demobilized from the Royal Navy in 1945. In London he invariably wears a dark blue suit with cuffs on the sleeves, a spotted bow tie loosely tied, a blue shirt with short sleeves, and loafers. “Wearing the same clothes saves me from having to wonder what I shall wear today,” he says rather defensively. “I hate buttons, studs and laces. I wear short-sleeved shirts because I cannot stand dirty cuffs.”
Fleming dislikes the theater because he feels he is held captive in the audience. He prefers movies because he is free to come and go as he pleases—“and they are cheaper.” He never watches television, and he detests flowers in his room. He hates cocktail parties. His wife, Ann, is a celebrated hostess and gives some of the best parties in London, but Fleming often succeeds in avoiding them.
Fleming protests constantly that he is not a gourmet like Bond, and that his favorite meal is scrambled eggs, but he cannot resist an adventure in exotic eating. The food does not have to be good, so long as it carries the spice of danger. Sometime ago. Fleming met an old friend from the Royal Navy, a polar explorer who had written a manual of survival for escaped prisoners of war.
“Can a man desperate from hunger live on grass?” Fleming asked him.
“Nobody can live on grass,” the explorer said.
“Suppose a Russian stood between you and starvation, and you killed him. Which is the best part of him to eat?”
“How should I know?” the explorer asked uneasily.
“I have been told that the palm of the hand is the tastiest,” Fleming persisted.
“No, no.”
“What then?”
The explorer looked about, then turned to Fleming, his eyes gleaming. “A cut off the ribs,” he said. “That’s the best part.”
This delights Fleming, for adventure is his passion. “Ian,” said one of his close friends, “is fundamentally a hero worshiper. He loves physical achievement in the face of adversity. It began in his awe of his elder brother, Peter, who had explored the Brazilian jungles, crossed the roof of China, and written fine books about his experiences. He worships Sugar Ray Robinson and Jacques Cousteau, the skin diver.”
These are the characteristics of Ian Fleming that are distilled into James Bond. This is the fundamental secret of Fleming’s success. No matter how fantastic his plots, he gives the impression that he knows what he is talking about. When he writes about SMERSH, the Russian spy apparatus, he writes from a background of several years in the Soviet Union. Two of his novels, Casino Royale and Moonraker, turn on desperate card games for huge stakes. Fleming can make the scenes authoritative because he is himself a fanatical gambler. He is also a six-handicap golfer. In Goldfinger Bond plays a game of golf with the diabolical Auric Goldfinger for $10,000—and, of course, wins.
Many readers complain of the torture scenes which keep bloodying his books, Fleming replies that these are exactly what happened to Allied agents during the war. He should know. He worked with Allied agents during the war.
Fleming was born on May 28, 1908, the second of the four sons of Maj. Valentine Fleming. M.P., D.S.O. His grandfather, Robert Fleming, was a private banker and a sometime associate of J. P. Morgan, His mother, Evelyn Fleming, was one of the most beautiful women in England, Like so many privileged children of the era, young Ian had a thoroughly unhappy childhood.
When he was eight, his father was killed on the Somme (Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for the Times). Fractious and needing affection, Ian was sent instead to an especially tough school which specialized in beating conformity into unhappy and rebellious children. He emerged reserved and arrogant, and went to Eton where he was confronted with a headmaster who, he said later, “had it in for the Flemings.” Eton didn’t work, and Fleming moved briefly to the military academy at Sandhurst, but he had no military inclinations. Another brief period at Munich, where he added fluent German to his fluent French, marked the end of Fleming’s formal education, and the beginning of the adventures which led to the creation of Bond.
Fleming became a journalist and went to Moscow as head of the Reuters bureau. Already, within the young, green Fleming, one could see the older, ever-curious Fleming peeping out. Many correspondents hated Moscow. Fleming loved it. He learned to speak good Russian, and he was endlessly fascinated by the presence of the secret police.
In those days almost the only possible “scoop” was an exclusive interview with Stalin, which every now and then he was prepared to grant. One day Fleming and Stanley Richardson of the Associated Press sent Stalin a joint letter, and to their astonishment received a personal reply. It was badly typed on a faulty typewriter and it said simply. “I am sorry I cannot see you,” signed “J. Stalin.” Though they had no story, Fleming and Richardson realized that the document did have a certain financial and historic value, and they agreed to play poker for it. Fleming won and still has it.
In 1939 the Admiralty—at that time perhaps the most alert of Britain’s fighting services—decided that it needed men like Fleming: multilingual, imaginative, fit. Called home and commissioned as a lieutenant, he worked as personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence. Much of his wartime work is still secret today, and most of the stories Fleming tells are farcical rather than daredevil.
On one memorable occasion when he and an assistant were required to question a captured U-boat commander to find out which routes the U-boats were taking through the British minefields in the Kattegat, Fleming had a flamboyant idea. Instead of grilling the commander in a grim prison office, why not soften him up by bringing him to London and questioning him over good food and fine wine?
The German and his first lieutenant, of unmistakably Teutonic bearing, were escorted to Scott’s Restaurant in Piccadilly in civilian clothes. Fleming and his aide were in uniform. Everyone spoke German throughout. Fleming ordered a bottle of Rhine wine and another and another. While the Englishmen were getting progressively drunker, the Germans stayed rigidly sober, revealing nothing. In the end Fleming gave it up and blearily took a taxi back to the Admiralty.
“Dammit, Fleming, what the devil have you been up to?” demanded the director of Naval Intelligence. “I have only just saved you from being arrested. You have tied up half of M.I. Five and the C.I.D. listening to you all afternoon.”
“Baker, the maitre d’hôtel, had reported that we had been behaving suspiciously,” Fleming recalls. “It showed an alert and proper attitude on his part, and I have patronized Scott’s ever since.”
On another occasion, when Fleming was on his way to secret talks in Washington in 1941, he stopped off with Admiral Godfrey at Estoril in Portugal. Fleming recognized German Intelligence agents in Estoril Casino playing chemin de fer. He decided to play them and take them for all of their secret funds. Instead of taking the Nazis, however, the Nazis took him, and Fleming sheepishly had to ask his chief for more travel money. This was to lead to the dramatic chemin de fer game which James Bond plays with the scoundrel Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. In the book Bond wins.
After D day Fleming took control, from London, of No. 30 Assault Unit, which was to become more celebrated among its members as F.P.N., or Fleming’s Private Navy. This was a group of some 300 Royal Marines who advanced with front troops to try to seize secret enemy equipment, codes, and so on. Despite the importance of Fleming’s secret war, he received no decoration at the end of it.
“He deserved a big one,” said one of the senior officers of the unit. “He would have got one if he had merely lifted a finger for it. But that is Ian for you. He will push with all his weight for one of his subordinates. He is always too indolent to push for himself.”
In 1945 Fleming was appointed foreign manager of the Kemsley Newspapers of London, then a rather somnolent Fleet Street newspaper group. It did not tax his intellect much, and left him plenty of time for golf. At the same time his private income was just enough to induce languor in someone not compulsively energetic. He was quite happy.
This enjoyable loafing ended in 1952, when, at the age of 44, he gave up bachelorhood and married Ann Rothermere, divorced wife of Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the London Daily Mail. The new Ann Fleming had enough dynamism. for both. “Horrified by the prospect of marriage, and to anesthetize my nerves,” Fleming later recalled, “I sat down, rolled a piece of paper into my battered portable, and began.”
He began with the words. “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired…” He called it Casino Royale. He deliberately gave his hero the least adventurous name he could think of. There is a real James Bond, author of a definitive work on birds of the West Indies.
It is now easy to see why the Bond stories have caught the popular imagination. Not only does Fleming write with great skill and verve, but there is a startling topicality about his work. Bond’s world of spy fantasia has proved to be no fantasia at all but a mirror of what is going on in the world. We know now that the Russians do build missile bases in nearby Caribbean islands (Doctor No). They do plot carefully to get beautiful girls into the beds of Allied agents (From Russia, With Love). Fleming said it first.
Fleming’s current novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is set in Switzerland and gets Bond married. Now that another winter is over. Fleming is polishing up Bond No. 12, in which, he confided recently, “Bond becomes Bondo-San.”
In London, New York and Jamaica, Fleming moves in a small society of talented friends who think he can and should do better than write spy novels. Fleming listens to the criticisms with a sardonic grin, fits another cigarette into his holder, and goes his own way.
What he thinks of his own work, he does not say, but he shows no sign of changing. He much prefers lying face down in the Caribbean, with a hot sun beating on his back, his mind far away. Will James Bond outwit the evil crypto-Communist tycoon, Sir Basil Quicksnade? Will he escape the dastardly plot to tum the Washington Monument into cheese? Will he save the dazzling Avis Rearguard from the back seat of the flaming Alfa Romeo? Will he sell yet another million copies to the wishful thinkers of this world?
JFK Is James Bond Fan—Ian Fleming Autographs Thrillers for President
By Hal McClure (AP, syndicated in The Morning Call [Allentown, Pennsylvania] July 14, 1963)
How does it feel to be President Kennedy’s favorite mystery thriller writer?
“It’s quite flattering,” says author Ian Fleming, whose melodramatic adventures of British secret agent James Bond have sold millions of books throughout the world.
Fleming, who at 54 is a somewhat older version of his suave fictional hero, was sitting outside the tiny Turkish railroad station of Yarımburgaz, where recently a British film company was shooting the latest James Bond movie, From Russia, With Love. The author had come down from London to watch.
He brushed lank gray hair from his eyes and a smile creased his ruddy face as he recalled his only meeting with President Kennedy.
“It was six months before the 1960 election and I was introduced to them as they walked along a Washington street. Both Mr. Kennedy and Jackie asked me, ‘Are you THE Ian Fleming?’
“That’s music to any writer’s ears.”
The President recently placed Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, a spy thriller that starts in Istanbul and goes behind the Iron Curtain, on a list of books he has most enjoyed reading.
Fleming said he has not seen Kennedy since, but sends him autographed copies of each new Bond book. “It’s the least I can do,” he added.
How did he start the James Bond books?
Fleming was foreign manager (he prefers manager to editor) of the [i]Sunday Times[/i] of London when he began the series in 1952. He drew on his own experiences in British naval intelligence in World War II.
“I was about to be married after 43 years of bachelorhood and it had been a momentous decision for me,” he said, then quipping: “I suppose I needed a diversion to get over the shock.”
He wrote his first book in Jamaica on his honeymoon. In all, he has written a dozen books at his Jamaica retreat. He smiled and continued telling about his writing habits.
“I never look back when I’m writing,” he said. “That’s good advice for young writers. If you start correcting and revising the previous day’s work, you waste another day. I revise only after I've finished the book.”
He said it takes him about six weeks to write the first draft, turning out about 2,000 words a day in two stints—from 10 a.m. to about noon and from 6 to 7 p.m.
Has his books’ success changed his life?
“Surprisingly little,” says Fleming. He said he still contributes a piece to the [i]Sunday Times[/i] now and then and continues to make his home in England. He admits if it weren’t for the high British income tax he’d be a millionaire today.
Fleming writes lovingly and knowingly of gambling and good eating in the Bond stories and admits he, like his hero, likes to gamble.
But as for being a gourmet, “I’d as soon eat scrambled eggs.” He says people like to read about exotic foods and he continues to write about them.
Since this week's interview was rather short (in retrospect I should have just excerpted it in the short interviews post) I'm throwing in some pictures.
Here's Fleming adjusting the shelves of an airport bookshop to make his books stand out more:
Tatiana and her creator (taken in Yarımburgaz?):
The author and his character:
The author and his profits. I'd like to know more about this image--who was the photographer? Is there more from the photoshoot?
Glad you enjoyed them! A kind soul on the MI6 board informed me that the last photo of Fleming was taken by Howell Conant. I did some googling and found another image that's probably from the same photoshoot:
Though last Friday's interview was short, this Friday's will be quite lengthy--and accompanied by more photos...
The Improbable Domestic Backdrop, the Life, of the World’s Most Successful Writer of Thrillers—the James Bond Books
By Robert Harling (Vogue, Sept. 1, 1963)
I will start somewhere near the beginning of the legend as it came my way.
During the war, Ian Fleming, as Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, fathered and was put in charge of one of those private “armies” apparently inseparable from modern war, although Hannibal was doubtless plagued by them; Nelson, too. This unit, of which I was a member, was known generally as 30 AU, more formally as No. 30 Assault Unit, and finally, as No.30 Advance Unit, and was organized as a result of the direful experiences of the British in the battle for Crete, when a similar German unit captured valuable British secret material. The British, always ready to learn, however late, decided to copy this rewarding notion. Fleming maintained close control over 30 AU, a necessary procedure, for members of the unit sometimes seemed to think that the war was being waged for their particular entertainment.
On one of Fleming’s visits to the unit, in company with his chief, Vice-Admiral Rushbrooke, permission for 30 AU to operate with American advance troop under General Patton’s command was suddenly deemed necessary. Off we went. Patton was in one of his more histrionic moods. Like Garrick playing Hotspur or Massey playing Lincoln, he strode before us, explaining how he would pip the Allied Commanders to Berlin. Later, over our K rations, under an intoxicating euphrasy induced partly by Patton and partly by Calvados, the end of the war seemed imminent. I asked Fleming what he would then do. He replied simply and grandiloquently: “I shall write the spy story to end all spy stories.”
I thought this was a bit steep but let it go.
Nobody, of course, had better grounding for the task. Before the war he had worked as a special correspondent for Reuters and The Times. He had served under two Directors of Naval Intelligence. He had taught himself to write a spare and simple prose. Above all, he knew how fictionally preposterous are the true espionage stories. Altogether, a reasonably factual springboard later for his own brand of fantasy
But all this was long ago. Twenty years. And the James Bond books didn’t start appearing until ten years later. By then he was doing a fair-sized job as Foreign Manager of The Sunday Times and other newspapers, owned at that time by Lord Kemsley and now by Roy Thomson. In between he got married and that was a fair-sized job, too. As Fleming is, in spite of physical vigour and other outward appearances, a somewhat idle fellow, these, allied with these other activities, all helped to postpone the Bond saga.
He published Casino Royale in 1953, its successors at yearly intervals. Another has just gone to his publisher. The demand for them is apparently insatiable and world wide.
In the course of this melodrama of success, Fleming has changed very little physically, mentally, and all the rest. He has put on a few pounds and slowed down a few steps, but he remains what he was, a tallish man with black hair, now touched by grey, above a dark-skinned, strong-featured, deep-lined face. His eyes are blue and of a sharp and gay intensity. When moody or broody, he can look somewhat sombre and threatening, but the mood soon goes. Merriment will out.
He dresses well but simply. Navy-blue suits, heavy in winter, lightweight in summer. Blue shirts, black and white spotted bow tie, very occasionally a striped club tie. His suits and shirts are made, his casual shoes—he eschews buttons and laces—bought off the rack. In common with most Englishmen, he hates shopping and always seems mildly intimidated by salesmen, whether in gunsmiths or shoe shops. At weekends, he exchanges these scarcely formal London clothes for a simple wardrobe of pull-overs, hounds-tooth tweed trousers, and nut-brown leather casuals.
He is no fancy dresser, but is interested in his clothes and even more interested, perhaps, in the clothes of his friends, especially when touched by any dash of eccentricity. Being a direct man by nature, he is prepared to point out these oddities. “Why that high-buttoned Italian jacket?” he will say. “Carrying a gun or bicycle chain?,” the latter being amongst the more fashionable and lethal weapons sported currently by London thugs.
During his brief sojourns in winter London, he adds a fairly exotic black-and-white check tweed overcoat to his outdoor accoutrements, but almost always carries his hat, a battered soft black felt, which, when worn in a sudden shower, is seen to be a sinister rakish headpiece that would arouse George Raft’s envy. He professes to have reduced his wardrobe to the essential elements suitable for a man of sophistication and modest self-esteem, but one or two of his friends suspect that he occasionally hankers after a more exuberant wardrobe.
Because the minutiae of the so-called sophisticated manner seem to preoccupy Fleming in all his books, many critics have accused him of snobbery of a fairly material order, but Fleming is incapable of the self-conscious imprisoning dedication needed for snobbery. He doubtless has his personal alleyways of snobbery (who hasn’t?) but they would take a lot of unravelling and are not very obvious. In any case, leanings towards snobbery are usually attributes of those lacking in self-confidence or vitality (not always related qualities) and Fleming has an abundance of nervous vitality and is, above all, natural in his dealings with all, friends, acquaintances, enemies, bores, and nobodies. His voice is straightforward, English, unaffected. So, too, is his laughter. So, too, is his genial disregard for other people’s feelings. Scarcely the ideal equipment in any approach to snobbery.
The interest of James Bond in the subtleties of food, wines, guns, cars, and the other material oddments of the high life, with which his critics make much play, are not stressed in Fleming’s own existence. His breakfast is based upon good coffee and honey. The honey is Norwegian, which may sound esoteric but is not: he simply regards this Scandinavian variety as the best for his palate. His favourite midday meal in his favourite restaurant, Scotts at Piccadilly Circus, starts with a large Martini, followed by a dozen Colchester oysters (which he prefers because they are the biggest and the best) plus a Guinness, followed by a Scotch woodcock, which is just scrambled eggs topped by crossed anchovies. On a fiendishly wintry day he will be likely to choose steak, kidney, and oyster pudding—quite a dish. He also likes fillets of fish, grilled or meunière. Like any Englishman knowledgeable about food, he prefers plaice to sole, for it is a more succulent fish, although cheaper than sole. He has no sweet tooth, rarely tastes cheese, and, like most heavy smokers, is no trencherman, despite the fact that his housekeeper, Mrs. Crickmere, is one of the best cooks in London. Fleming is no wine drinker either. He prefers Martinis midday and, in the evening, fairly stiff potions of brandy and ginger ale or, not the drink of his forefathers, Scotch, but bourbon and water. He smokes too heavily. His cigarettes are made for him, not exclusively, of course, but he is against any of the well-known mass-production brands. He would like to cut down his smoking, but there it is.
He has always been interested in motorcars, personally and generally. Before the war he had a deep regard for the Invicta (now no longer made) and the Le Mans Bentley models. He has been through a tidy postwar collection. At first, they were British models, and even, for one day, a Daimler, but on his wife’s flick-knife remark that he looked rather like the late Queen Mary inside it, he swapped it forthwith for a racier model and has stayed racy ever since, moving steadily through the Detroit range of Thunderbirds to his present supercharged Studebaker Avanti. He also has considerable respect for the Mercedes stable, but thinks top handmade English cars are apt to be too fussy.
He has written at length about his passion for guns. This derives partly from schoolboy hangover stuff, and partly because he has enormous respect for all beautiful handmade objects, whether simple-seeming but complex steely mechanisms made to kill or enamelled golden Fabergé objects made to captivate.
Part of the recondite expertise which he provides in his books and which drives his critics into apoplexy derives from his deep-foraging interest in other people’s offbeat jobs. He will dig relentlessly away at the professional know-how of gunsmith, wrestler, geisha girl, engine driver, deep-sea diver, croupier, matrimonial agent, tightrope walker, or steeplejack. And as almost anybody will willingly talk about his job, Fleming gets his data.
He cannot bear to be bored. He likes companionship—on his terms. In spite of his obvious attraction to and for women, he prefers the company of men. He has an enormously juvenile sense of humour, and takes delight in bizarre tales with prosaic endings or [i]vice versa[/i], especially if the tales are of happenings to his friends. He readily appreciates a droll tale or quip: a friend confessing to “angst in his pants”; another’s contention that every French youth of sixteen owns three objects: “a moustache, a mistress, and a hoop.”
Fleming loves his friends dearly, particularly if they make no demands upon him. A reasonable request, for he makes no demands on them, apart from a hope for entertainment, and of this he gives as good as he gets. He keeps his disparate friends away from each other and they rarely meet. He has, say, a couple of friends in each of his several worlds: golf, journalism, gambling, Boodle’s (one of the half-dozen leading London clubs), publishing, finance. He spaces out his luncheons with them so that neither side is bored by too frequent a rendezvous. These meals and their pre-planning are important to him, though in general he prefers to eat alone. So, too, is the spacing-out and distance-keeping, for, although to his friends he is a warmhearted man, he also has a hard-rock reserve, a fairly formidable seam reached pretty early on in acquaintance with him.
Like most of us he has a yearning for affection, yet, like most Englishmen—or Scotsmen—of his kind, is ill-fitted by upbringing and habit to acquire the technique of affection-getting, which, after all, is basically a reflex of affection-giving. The English upper crust wants and needs affection as deeply as any other crust, but impulses towards this important emotional release are frequently stifled for them at about the age of eight when boys go away to boarding school. Affection by letter and postcard is as broken-backed as most other emotions by proxy. The boys grow up, professing to hate what they so need. Hence the undertones of sadism and masochism so frequent among British males. Hence, perhaps, those passages in the Bond books which have provoked such bitter attacks. Stuff here for a thesis by some psycho-quiz sophomore.
This imprisonment of the emotions is gradually being dismantled in Britain, but it gripped Fleming’s generation in steely handcuffs. Yet because emotion cannot be wholly buried in print and must out somewhere, somehow, Fleming’s temper is occasionally explosively violent. But, then, most Englishmen would rather admit to outbursts of spleen than affection.
His interests are basically mouvementés. He was an athlete at school and in early manhood and retains his interest in sport. He was a partner of Donald Healey, one of England’s more enterprising racing-car drivers before World War II. He has climbed and skied and sailed, but his first love was golf and remains so. This respect for physical achievement is reflected in his continuing capacity for hero-worship. He started by hero-worshipping his elder brother, Peter, a scholarly explorer-reporter. He continues to admire men who excel in games or endurance: Cousteau, the deep-sea explorer; Bannister, the first four-minute miler; Peter Thomson, the golfer; Heinrich Harrer, the seven-year-in-Tibet man; Douglas Bader, the fighter-pilot, who lost both legs in the war and leads as full a life as Lord Beaverbrook.
Yet he has interests far off from the sporting and strenuous life. I met him because of his interest in the complexities of typography, my own absorbing hobby, and I have travelled with him into one of the more derelict purlieus of London to track down brass reliefs of mythological gods and goddesses—he has the finest collection of brass pictures in England. He has similarly wandered with John Betjeman to inspect some of the lesser masterpieces of London’s ecclesiastical architecture.
He formed, with the help of Percy Muir, one of the most notable and knowledgeable of English bookdealers, a remarkable collection of books on milestones in original thought through the great revolutionary periods from the end of the eighteenth century. His wide and unique collection includes such rarities as first editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species; Einstein’s basic paper on the theory of relativity; Helmholtz’s monograph on the ophthalmoscope; Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?.
Muir, a long-time friend, vividly remembers Fleming’s succinct instructions: “You get the collection going. I’ll buy it, book by book, but I’m not very keen to do overmuch work on it myself.” Fleming kept to his side of the bargain without going back one whit on his word, Muir warmly said. The collection was valued some years ago by John Carter, the bibliographical pundit of Sotheby’s, the London auction house, at many thousands of pounds. He prefers the books. Another of his side interests is his ownership of The Book Collector, perhaps the world’s most erudite bibliographical journal, edited by John Hayward. Fleming has kept this magazine alive through thick and thin and cosseted the journal into its present valuable authority and financial stability.
Fleming married in his early forties. This fact should not be taken to indicate either a lack of interest in women or a predilection for the celibate life. He had known many women, but had managed to elude them. As someone said: “Ian is like a handful of sea water; he slips away through your fingers—even while you’re watching.” Perhaps the girls were too undemanding, for when Fleming did marry it was only after a period of shattering personal complexities and tensions for himself and his wife, experiences which would have meant nervous breakdowns for lesser combatants.
Anne Fleming (née Charteris) was first married to Lord O’Neill (who was killed in the war in 1944), then to Lord Rothermere, from whom she was divorced in 1952. She married Fleming immediately she was free. As a simple “Esquire” he remained unperturbed in following these resounding titles, but promised his wife that if he ever became ennobled he would choose as his title “Lord S.W.1.,” the London postal district in which he lives.
Anne Fleming (known as “Annie” to her friends) is a slim, dark, handsome, highly strung, iconoclastic creature of middle height with a fine pair of flashpoint eyes. She has something of the air of an imperious gypsy, and I have always thought that long, multicoloured flouncing skirts would become her even more than those of more modish length. Suitably attired, she would, seated on the steps of a caravan, have made a magnificent addition to the late Augustus John’s paintings of the Romany folk of the Welsh Marches.
A woman of clear-cut views, Anne Fleming provokes extreme reactions as a wasp provokes panic. Her friends adore her. Others, intimidated by what they consider to be her ruthless vitality and unequivocal views on this or that, are more reserved in their response. She is certainly more interested in men than women, although she does have a few fairly close women friends, notably Lady Avon (wife of the former Sir Anthony Eden), Lady Diana Duff Cooper, and Loelia, Duchess of Westminster. But her main friendships are with men, or possibly with the minds of men, and she retains a bright schoolgirl’s undue respect for academic distinction and political achievement. Thus her closest friends include Somerset Maugham, novelist; Evelyn Waugh, novelist: Sir Isaiah Berlin, philosopher; Sir Maurice Bowra, classical scholar; Sir Frederick Ashton, choreographer; Cecil Beaton, artist et al; Malcolm Muggeridge, most ruthless of commentators; Noél Coward, playwright and songbird; Randolph Churchill, controversialist; Lucian Freud, artist grandson of Sigmund; Peter Quennell, poet and historian; Cyril Connolly, critic and wit. And so on and on. The list is lengthy and formidable. All these men delight in her company, savouring the occasional sharp edge of her tongue, but, even more, her talent for provoking others to dispute. Certainly she is not the kind of woman to whom men would be likely to bring confession of failure or weakness: they are more apt to come to her table to display their learning and to sharpen their wits.
Perhaps somewhat inevitably, with these intellectual predilections and companionships, Anne Fleming has taken a mildly dyspeptic view of her husband’s runaway success with his controversial thrillers. “These dreadful Bond books,” she has called them publicly, and there is no doubt she would swap a thousand James Bonds for one Stephen Dedalus.
Her marriage weathered one of its trickier moments when Fleming, returning to his house from Jamaica, overheard Cyril Connolly reading aloud to a collection of Mrs. Fleming’s intellectual guests, and with appropriate theatrical emphasis, extracts from his first Bond page-proofs. Yet being as socially energetic as she is, Anne Fleming seemed to enjoy, to the fullest degree, the revelry attendant upon the press showing of [i]Dr. No[/i], the first Bond adventure to be filmed, with Sean Connery as Bond. The evening party at Les Ambassadeurs, a night spot, was a rollicking fiesta which laid Fleming low, but gave his wife full scope for involving Somerset Maugham and a score of other improbable guests in a midnight frolic.
The Flemings started their marriage in a large Chelsea flat overlooking the River Thames, a far cry from his discreet bachelor mews house in Mayfair and her own in one of London’s largest mansions, Warwick House, Lord Rothermere’s house, overlooking the Green Park. The large flat, with its sometimes gay but more often melancholy outlook over the wide grey river, didn’t suit Anne Fleming’s mood or manner and they soon moved to a small Regency, cream-stuccoed house in London’s smallest square, about a hundred yards from the riding school of Buckingham Palace. There they have remained through eleven years.
The house is a particularly pleasant example of English urban architecture, even better adapted for living in today than when it was built, and, as it is one of two corner houses, with emphatically bowed windows, it has even more charm than its terraced neighbours.
[Photo of the house, taken in 2017]
Within, the house has a warm, welcoming, carefree air, resulting from a skillfully casual arrangement of comfortable chairs and sofas, Regency furniture, with a profusion of brass inlay, Fleming’s black Wedgwood busts, multitudinous books, and a highly individual collection of pictures, including paintings by Augustus John, Lucian Freud, Victorian lesser masters, and, of course, brass pictures of flighty goddesses and martial heroes.
[Caption:] Fleming's bedroom, above, has walls papered in bottle green, and such interesting bookmates as A Walk on the Wild Side and Firearms Curiosa; on the round table beside the bed, Lectures on Psychical Research; on the table in the foreground, Dangerous Marine Animals; Northern Underground; Science and History. On the bookshelves on the right: some of the Fleming collection of black basalt Wedgwood busts. The bedspread is a heavy needleworked portrait of "Regina Victoria, 1875."
This doll’s house has a bowed dining room that seats eight in comfort but must frequently take a willing dozen in diminished comfort, for Anne Fleming is perhaps the most naturally gifted and successful hostess in London, a position due chiefly to her own high vivacity allied with a simple belief that the perfect recipe for an entertaining evening is well-chosen, well-cooked food, good wines, and a group of egomaniacal talkers with diametrically (or, even better, diabolically ) opposed philosophies. The results are noisy, fierce, and memorable.
Fleming is rarely present at these dinner parties (or gab-fests, as he terms them) which are likely to take place at the rate of a couple a week in the season. Forewarned is forearmed, he claims, and at the appropriate moment, he is more likely to be settled in at the Portland Club, temple of gastronomy and the game of bridge, playing an expensive game with reasonably responsive results, than sitting at his own dining table. Returning at midnight, he is likely to find his wife’s guests still at table, still embattled in high-voiced political diatribe, abuse, and argument. Fleming, waving not too demonstrative a greeting, proceeds upstairs to his own room and comparative tranquility.
Occasionally, he openly pines for a quiet little mouse of a wife who might worshipfully await his evening arrival with carpet slippers and a large Martini, but au fond he is another man who needs to re-sharpen his wits from time to time and finds in his wife a ready sponsor for such an enterprise.
They are one in affection for their ten-year-old son, Caspar; less at one perhaps, in their hopes for this young man, for Anne Fleming believes that the highest destiny for any Englishman is to be Prime Minister, while it is certain that Fleming would settle for a lesser, and perhaps more permanent, career. Whatever bent the boy does eventually follow, lucre need not be his primary ambition, for he is the unknowing recipient of much of Fleming’s income from Bond.
By her first marriage, Anne Fleming had two children: a son and a daughter. The son is the present twenty-nine-year-old Lord O’Neill, the fourth Baron. Here, too, Anne Fleming had been daunted in her wish for a politically-minded son, for Lord O’Neill, a gay but self-contained and resolute young man, prefers life on his Northern Irish estates and running a large garage in Belfast to life among the metropolitan politicos. His sister, Fiona, was married three years ago to a young Foreign Office First Secretary, with a considerable reputation as a Russian and Chinese authority.
At this time the Flemings have completed another house in a fairly remote part of Oxfordshire. This new house has been added to the enchanting remains of a seventeenth-century house built by the side of a woodland lake of considerable bucolic charm. Here, the tale goes, Fleming will find the restful background he needs for writing his books, but others suspect that in truth he loathes the quiet sequestered life in England and prefers his present split-level life between London, various golf-courses, and the Caribbean.
Fleming does a good deal of his more ephemeral writing in a small office in Mitre Court, off Fleet Street, a courtway set amongst the chambers of barristers and the offices of journalists. There, for three or four days a week, he keeps more or less regular hours and copes with an avalanche of demands for his views on Life and Luv, revolvers and flick-knives, food and drink, travel and adventure. Here, too, he sees agents, interviews interviewers, and a growing tribe of film men. But his books are written in Jamaica.
He bought his Jamaican property in 1946, inspired by two wartime weeks conniving with the U. S. Office of Naval Intelligence to counter the U-boat offensive in the Caribbean. All those who have a dream house in mind yet can not draw should take heart from Fleming’s enterprise, for although he cannot draw a line, he designed his own house. And the house is the most practical and pleasant house any traveler could hope to find at a tropical journey’s end. Low-built, wide-eaved, wide-windowed, the house is proof against the snarl-up of the hurricane and the downbeat of the sun.
Here, for two months every year—January and February—Fleming is at his mellow best. The transplanted Englishman becomes a genial Caribbean squire. Here his yearnings towards a more exuberant wardrobe are given scope by recourse to an occasional shirt. For the rest it is life in shorts and sandals.
To his resident Caribbean housekeeper, Violet, every word of the master’s is both law and benediction. Every culinary whim must be indulged. Every possible comfort quadrupled. Here he works, with a fierce intensity, as he is one of those men who would rather work as a galley slave for two months than be a ten-till-six serf for eleven. And here the Bond books are written. “I’ve got this bloody man Bond half way up a cliff and must leave him there overnight if I’m to answer your letter. Well, here goes...”
Here, too, he swims for long hours above and between the reefs which ring his private beach. Once upon a recent time he was a keen underwater swimmer, but now, less adventurous, he peers at the nearer denizens, floating away the afternoon, dreaming up, for the pleasure of President and policeman, professor and popsy, yet more improbable situations for superman Bond to love in or escape from, all of which, according to rumour, will be translated into more languages than exist.
Glad you enjoyed the first half--I should warn everyone that a couple of even longer pieces (the Fleming-Simenon dialogue and the Playboy interview) are coming up soon!
That was a fantastic read @Revelator I loved that it was written by someone properly familiar with Fleming, who could give guarded but detailed insight into the author's world. There's some hyperbole in the early sections and in the paragraphs about Anne, who Harling appears to admire perhaps more than his subject.
Some brilliant summaries of Fleming's day-to-day existence that could only come from someone blessed with the Master's genuine personal voice, not the public one.
Best line "ABOVE ALL HE KNEW HOW FICTIONALLY PREPOSTEROUS ARE TRUE ESPIONAGE STORIES" which fairly vindicates Fleming's style and sticks a finger at his critics.
The World of Bond and Maigret: Fleming Meets Simenon (Sunday Times, Sept. 15, 1963 and Harper’s Bazaar, Nov. 1964)
By Gordon Young
The low-slung black supercharged Studebaker Avanti which drove up one evening last month to the ancient Château d’Eschandens, outside Lausanne, was upholstered in rich black leather. It had self-powered windows, nine crimson-lettered dials on its dashboard and a top speed of 170 m.p.h. It is one of the few cars of its kind in Europe.
Its driver, Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was paying his first visit to Georges Simenon, author of 167 novels (forty-nine of them filmed) and creator of Jules Maigret. Their meeting had been arranged by Gordon Young, who recorded their two-hour talk, from which the extracts here are taken.
The scene is Simenon’s private study on the first floor of the château, his home. High-vaulted castle windows look out on to a quiet park; white walls are sparsely decorated with a few family photographs and a painting by Fernand Léger. (A Simenon portrait by Bernard Buffet is in the salon on the ground floor.)
In an alcove, racks hold Simenon’s twenty-four pipes and six great glass jars of tobacco. Ten more pipes are on Simenon’s inlaid antique desk, along with a pot full of sharpened pencils, four copies of the latest Simenon Penguin edition—and Simenon’s golden ball, on an ebony block. (Because Simenon needs something to play with while he thinks, Madame Simenon had this solid gold ball made for him by Cartier of Paris.)
Simenon, young and sprightly at sixty, sits at his desk in a spotless white open-necked wool shirt and flannel trousers. Fleming, casual, in a well-worn blue sports shirt and charcoal woolen cardigan, looks like Bond on holiday. Perched on a stool against the wall is Denise, Simenon’s French-Canadian wife and efficient business manager, in a beige woolen suit and brown-trimmed white silk blouse.
Fleming has just come back from playing in a golf tournament at Aigle and, since Simenon is a golfer too, Fleming begins easily with a wry account of his defeat…
Fleming: I was outsmarted. I always thought I was good off my handicap but somebody was better; an American. They were playing a most extraordinary competition…
Simenon: (talking excellent English, with a soft Maurice Chevalier accent) I played a round this morning. But every night when I’ve been playing golf during the day, I think “Why did I miss that shot?” and I try in my mind to find what was wrong, and it takes me an hour before I can go to sleep—and the next day I make the shot worse than I did the day before.
Fleming: I think one becomes too self-conscious. I know that when I address a ball I feel all my muscles, everything working, and I think how the shot is going to be and so forth. Well, that’s stupid; you’ve got to be an automaton, have a repeating swing.
Simenon: I'm not as lucky as you are—you have a 13 handicap. That’s not bad.
Fleming: It’s not very good. But I find golf a wonderful relaxation, anyway. It cuts you down to size and it can be hilariously dramatic.
Simenon: It's the only way after you’re sixty, and I'm sixty, so…
Fleming: Well, I’m fifty-five.
Simenon: You’re a young man.
Fleming: I read your first books in 1939 on my way to Moscow. I stopped in either Amsterdam or The Hague and there on the bookstall was a whole collection of those very good jackets you had in those days, those photographic jackets. I bought three or four to take to Moscow, and I absolutely adored them. And I think, of course, that if it hadn’t been for those jackets I probably shouldn’t have bought them for years. I think jackets are very important for books. But publishers don't seem to think so.
Simenon: Oh, yes, now they care a lot about jackets, especially in America. They study a jacket for weeks sometimes and try five, six, seven different jackets.
Fleming: Do they give you a chance to comment on your jackets?
Simenon: They give me the chance, but I don’t bother. I never worry about a book when it’s finished.
Fleming: Really? Don’t you like the way it appears and how it’s printed?
Simenon: Not especially.
Fleming: Oh, I’m very keen on that.
Simenon: As soon as the book is out of this room, it’s out of my life.
Fleming: What about correcting? I mean who does the correcting for you? Does your publisher correct and then send corrections back to you and suggest things or not?
Simenon: No.
Fleming: Nobody does?
Simenon: No.
Fleming: I find I make stupid mistakes which they correct.
Simenon: My publisher has not the right to change a comma—not even to suggest to change a comma.
Fleming: Very interesting. But I find I keep on getting into bad habits: I get a word which I use too often. At the moment I’m going through an awful period of using the word “just.” “It was just five miles away.” … “He was just going to get into his motor car,” and I keep on putting this damn word in. It’s like a painter who finds that he’s painted a "face" somewhere in his picture that everyone sees but him.
Simenon: I have exactly the same trouble—but the word changes for each novel. In one book I will always use the word “mais”—“but”—in another always “perhaps,” so it takes me three days to take out all the “perhapses.”
Fleming: Well, I do most of that myself, but I still find…you see, I’ve got a very good publisher’s reader, William Plomer, who’s a great poet and an extremely nice man, and he said some time ago that I never put in any exclamation marks. This stuck in my mind, and so in my last book I put in exclamation marks like pepper. And my publishers left them in. Now only yesterday I got a fierce review in The New York Times saying not only is Ian Fleming a very inferior writer but he has the girlish trick of putting in exclamation marks all over the place. I think a little help occasionally from a good reader is a very helpful thing. How many people read your manuscript before it goes to the publishers?
Simenon: My wife reads the copy every day, but she doesn’t correct anything and she doesn’t even speak to me about it.
Fleming: Well, my wife reads my books and also says nothing, but that upsets me.
Simenon: My wife reads the pages every day and then she doesn’t read it again.
Mme. Simenon: Well, I usually look at the proofs when they comes back.
Fleming: That’s what I mean. Who does the proof correcting?
Mme. Simenon: Well, I weed them a bit.
Simenon: I don’t even send away my manuscripts. When the manuscript has been corrected by me, instead of typing it again it’s Photostatted and it’s the Photostat which goes to the publisher. So the MS never leaves this house. I prefer some little mistakes to a too-cold correctness.
Fleming: Well, you write wonderful French. I read your books always in French when I can. You have one of the most beautiful French styles I know.
Simenon: Some French critics have said I have no style at all. And they are almost right, because what I have tried for forty years how is to avoid everything which is like literature.
Fleming: Not to be too literary? I agree.
Simenon: Yes. To stay as simple as possible.
Fleming: Well, you’ve always been like that. I think that, say, 100 years from now, you’ll be one of the great classical French authors. I’ve always said so. You’ll be the Balzac of…
Simenon: To tell you the truth I don’t care, because I won’t be there.
Fleming: Of course you’ve written novels, you see. In fact all your books are novels of suspense, whereas I write quite a different thing, which is the thriller, a thing of action and no psychology—except that the villain occasionally has to have some psychology to explain why he should be a villain. But I never try to examine my characters in depth, whereas all your books do that. I haven’t read all your books, but probably about fifty of them.
Simenon: I know what you write, but to tell you the truth I have never read it—for one reason, and that is that at age of twenty-five I decided never to read any novels again. And I haven’t read any novels since 1928. Not a single one. I have a lot of friends who are writers and they send me their books and inscribe them. I know your books from the critics, and that’s why I know you very well.
Fleming: Have you written about Switzerland?
Simenon: No, I very seldom write about a country where I live. It takes me a long time. For example, in the United States I waited almost six or seven years before I wrote about America. I prefer to be far away, to have some recul…You stand in Trafalgar Square or the Champs-Elysees and try to describe it in, say, a hundred words. It’s impossible—because you see too many details; you will have three pages instead of a hundred words. But if you are in Tanganyika dreaming about a glass of ale and Trafalgar Square or a terrace in the Champs-Élysées, you will in two sentences give the essential. And that’s why I prefer always to be far away from the setting.
Fleming: Quite true. I write all my books in Jamaica. I can’t really write anywhere else—because there’s a vacuum there and I can only write in a vacuum. I can’t do it in England—life simply won’t allow me to. My friends are quite uninterested in my writing—they think I can turn these things out in five minutes and that this is anyway not literature and therefore deserves no sympathy at all.
Simenon: Here we cut every connection with life around us when I am on a novel. Nobody comes here, not even relations, and I don’t go to town or even to the village. I walk in the garden, I count my steps, and I know how many kilometres I make a day just to get some fresh air.
Young: How long does that go on for—how long do you put yourself through that?
Simenon: It depends on the length of the novel, but not only that. It also depends on whether I write a book at the rate of one chapter a day or if I write a book like I did the last one—one day writing a chapter by hand, and the next day writing it over again on the typewriter. With some books I write in the afternoon one chapter by hand and the next day in the morning at six o’clock I rewrite it on the typewriter. That is what I call doing a book with two sittings a day. But for certain novels I write by hand for one day both morning and afternoon—only one chapter—and the next day I type it, so that takes twice the time. A novel in two sittings takes from eight to eleven days, and a novel with one sitting a day takes twenty-two to twenty-four days—that’s about it. And then the revision takes from three days to one week. I hate revising a book.
Fleming: I don’t mind revising because I feel the book is finished. I’ve done my work and I can play with it then.
Simenon: It seems to me so disgusting when I read my book over again; I say to myself but this is not at all interesting, nobody will read it—it’s so flat and dull and inconclusive. I hate that job.
Fleming: Well, I write straight on to the typewriter and I never look back until I get to the bottom of the page, because otherwise I’m so horrified while I’m writing at what awful piffle it is that I could never get on with it—I’d lose pace at once if I started correcting what I’d written the day before.
Simenon: I understand. I never do it until later; I work until the book is finished. That’s why I like the typewriter, because with the typewriter you don’t look back—you keep your rhythm. You spoke about style a little while ago. I consider rhythm as the definition of style—and the style comes from rhythm, like in music or painting. It’s a question of the rhythm, of the colour, and if you write and keep coming back on it again you lose the rhythm.
Fleming: And you lose pace. I think pace is very important. I think in books where there’s some sort of a mystery, people do want to get on; they don’t want suddenly to have to wonder what is the hero doing, why is he doing this.
Simenon: Yes, that’s even more important in the books you write than in the books I write.
Fleming: But then, don’t you feel that people get rather tired if Maigret, for instance, at the end of a book has to assemble all the suspects and examine them all and give the reader a chance to guess which is the villain? Don’t you have to be very careful not to hold up the speed too much?
Simenon: I don’t pay any particular attention. In most of the Maigret stories I think people know after ten or twenty pages who is the killer or whatever it is. I don’t like to have four or five suspects and have to choose between them. Do you think that the reader of today does still try to guess? I don't think so.
Fleming: No, that’s very old-fashioned.
Simenon: So you have to give them something else than just to guess. Even my children now guess everything after five or six minutes.
Fleming: Yes, that’s quite true. But of course we’ve still got in England the old-fashioned detective story—the Agatha Christie type of story, with the suspects and the poisoning and all the rest of it. I personally can’t read them, because I'm not interested enough in who did it. But lots of people, the Oxford don and the Cambridge don, go on writing this sort of book. Up to a point in America too—Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner. They’re all exactly the same, the Erle Stanley Gardner ones. I can’t read them. But Stout I always read because his Nero Wolfe is such a splendid monster.
Young: As an ordinary reader of both of you, and a great admirer of both of you, what I have always wanted to know very badly is this: To what extent have your own personal experiences been the basis of your writing? How much of your lives come into your books?
Fleming: Well, from my point of view, practically none at all, except through one’s powers of observation. I invent the most hopeless-sounding plots; very often they are based on something I’ve read in a newspaper. And people say, “Oh, this is all nonsense”—and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols. Last year a Russian spy got a heavy sentence for killing three West Germans in this way—with a water pistol. So I find constantly that things I’ve read about in some obscure magazine or somewhere are always coming true in real life. But I go around the world a lot—for instance, I set my last book in Japan. Well, I couldn’t possibly have done that unless I’d spent a lot of time in Japan.
Simenon: I never put a precise experience of my own into a book, but everything is experience to an author, every minute of his life. So I wouldn’t write the same books if I didn’t lead the same life. But I never consciously use something I know, or some person I know. For example , I know a lot of people, but I never think when I'm meeting somebody, “Oh, this one will be a good character in one of my novels.” It’s the same if I travel; I never travel as a writer, looking at somebody or taking notes; but twenty years later it comes back and I use it.
Comments
A good interview that. Fleming reads very naturally in it. There's one paragraph in the middle which reads like a cut & paste from Who's Who, which suggests the journalist wasn't over interested in his subject.
That Other Secret Service Feller
It’s Pistols for Two When Ian Fleming Meets his Latest Rival
By Peter Evans (Daily Express, March 27, 1963)
He selected a cigarette, placed it in his ebony holder and lit it with a gold lighter. It was all done with the studied rhythm of a man playing for time while thinking of exactly what to say.
“I look forward to meeting this fellow,” Ian Fleming said finally, tilting his head towards the ceiling and gently blowing smoke after his words.
With one finger he pushed aside the curtains of the private room over the restaurant not very far from Tottenham Court-road and looked down-into the street.
“Yes, indeed,” he said after another long moment, “It should be a most fascinating encounter. Even perhaps memorable.”
The threat
Indeed. For the missing guest was Mr. Len Deighton, the author whose first spy book, The Ipcress File, has made him the biggest threat to the suave Mr. Fleming and his equally suave hero James Bond since Smersh.
Deighton’s unnamed agent has been snapped up by Bond’s own publishers, Jonathan Cape, and signed by the producers who filmed Doctor No.
What is even more fascinating is that where Mr. Fleming is reputed partly to have modeled Agent 007 on himself, so Deighton’s fumbling, cheapskate hero has more than a touch of his curious creator.
Mr. Fleming, who himself nominated The Ipcress File among the [Sunday Times] Books of the Year, said “I simply have to meet him, you know. It is important to know the kind of fellow you are up against.”
Some fifteen minutes late, Deighton arrived—an untidy man in one or those 1963 suits with the 1957 price tags. He made it look lumpy. On his cuff-units were colour pictures of Littlehampton. He is a man who looks in a perpetual state of surprise.
“This is a bit posh, isn’t it?” he said, shaking Fleming’s hand. “They very nearly didn’t let me in downstairs.”
A silence
Mr. Fleming arranged his face into a bleak smile. “It is rather a pleasant little restaurant,” he said, searching his rival’s face like a map-reader searching for a bearing.
There was the kind of sharp silence that occurs in the first round at a boxing match, when the crowd is waiting for the first punch to be thrown.
Mr. Fleming opened up. “My favourite restaurant is Scotts, actually. Almost got arrested there during the war, as a matter of fact. They suspected I was a German spy. Awfully amusing.
“I was working for [Naval] Intelligence and giving some U-Boat commander a slap-up lunch. The idea was to pump him for information. Cost about £20 and the blighter didn’t talk. Saw right through it obviously,” Fleming admitted pleasantly.
“Anyway, the waiters heard us yapping away in German and in no time we were surrounded by police. I got a most frightful rocket when I got back to my office.”
Deighton’s head began to rock slowly backwards and forwards, as if mesmerised by Mr. Fleming’s story.
“You were in intelligence yourself, weren’t you?” Mr. Fleming put the question across like an angry schoolmaster who has caught one of his pupils dozing.
“Yes. Air Intelligence,” admitted Deighton.
“I guessed as much,” said Mr. Fleming, a look of satisfaction seeping over his face like a blush. “You get pretty near the knuckle in some parts, I must say. Anyway, I realized you knew what you were talking about—as indeed I do.”
The cars
“Your next book,” said Deighton slowly, is set in Japan.”
“Correct,” said Mr. Fleming, his face a mask. “It’s called You Only Live Twice. I’ve just been to Tokyo actually. Ran over on the old willow pattern route. Very jolly. Saki and kimonos and all that damn bowing amuses me enormously. Ever been to Tokyo?”
“Yes,” said Deighton.
“Fly?”
“BOAC,” said Deighton.
“Pleasant?”
“I was a steward,” said Deighton.
Again that circling, first-round silence. “I have a rotten feeling,” Deighton said moodily, “that my car’s going to be towed away.”
“What do you drive, old boy?” asked Mr. Fleming, perhaps sensing a common bond in cars.
“A beaten-up old Volkswagen, actually,” said Deighton, adding brightly, “but I’ve installed a telephone. Yours?”
A joke
“I’ve just got one of those new Studebaker Avantis. Naught to 60 in 4.5 seconds, 175 miles an hour with four passengers up. Supercharged, of course. I must say I adore it,” said Fleming.
Silence. Then: “You know what we should do?" asked Mr. Fleming suddenly. “We should start a running joke in our books. Like those chaps Crosby and Hope. I’ll get Bond to knock your chap—you really should give him a name, you know—and you can get him to tear the hell out of Bond.”
“Super,” said Deighton, “I’d love to knock Bond. You remind me of him in many ways.”
The smile
A thin smile traced across Mr. Fleming’s face. “Really? Well, I do identify myself with him in a few things.”
Mr. Fleming smiled a sad smile. “But of course Bond has a far better digestion than I have, and his prowess with women is considerably greater than mine, unfortunately. Needless to say, he has more guts.”
Deighton asked: “Do you honestly like Bond?”
Mr. Fleming thought about this question for a minute, then: “I began by disliking him intensely. I’ve grown to like him. To be honest, I think your fellow is rather more solid—indeed, Bond is often quite cardboard—but I have put him through so much it would be too disloyal not to like him now.”
It was, as Mr. Fleming predicted, a most fascinating encounter.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Note: Fleming afterward wrote to Raymond Hawkey, who had also attended the meeting: "Thank you also for the amusing photograph of me and Len Deighton. I am sorry to say I thought Evans’ piece was pretty skimpy, but don’t tell him I said so!"
Hawkey, an art college friend of Deighton, had designed the cover for The Ipcress File and went on to design the Pan paperbacks of the Bond series. Fleming acclaimed Hawkey's first Bond cover (for Thunderball) as "really brilliant...I think it is quite splendid and I don't think the filthy little Pan sign spoils it too much."
Fleming did indeed mention Deighton in his contribution to the Sunday Times "Books of the Year" feature (Dec. 23, 1962), though with reservations:
"The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton (Hodder & Stoughton), was a brilliant firework, but rather too 'scatty' for my taste. I don’t think thrillers should be 'funny.'"
In a letter to his close friend William Plomer, dated May 20, 1964, Fleming discussed Deighton's Funeral in Berlin:
"Amusing cracks but I simply can’t be bothered with his kitchen sink writing & all this Nescafe. Reminds me of [John] Bratby. I think Capes should send him to Tahiti or somewhere & get him to ‘tell a story’. He excuses his ignorance of life with his footnotes & that won’t stand up for long –- nice chap though he is."
Deighton worked on the screenplay of From Russia With Love, though it seems his contributions were mostly disregarded. He later collaborated with Kevin McClory and Sean Connery on the script for the unmade Bond film Warhead. In 2012 he published the ebook James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father. I haven't read it, but the Amazon review by John Cork (the Bond expert) suggests the book has some problems.
Many thanks, @Revelator, that was one I'd been waiting for though I must agree with Fleming's comment to Hawkey about Evans!
I agree as well. Evans plays the conversation for comedy, and while it's quite funny to read about the writers' class difference and basic incompatibility, you wonder if more substantial parts of the conversation were left out of the article.
I remember having a discussion over on CBn years ago where Peter Evans's other Bond related articles came up and I think we came to the conclusion that some of his pieces (such as I think with Simenon meeting Fleming) were rather fabricated. I'm not saying that's the case here but I do remember thinking some of his reporting of the conversations between famous authors was more imagined than real.
Agree with all of the above.
You might be thinking of a different interview, since the Simenon/Fleming meeting (coming up in a few weeks) was conducted by Gordon Young, and appears too long and detailed to be a fabrication. But there's certainly a possibility that the conversations Peter Evans reported were substantially reworked by the time they appeared in print. The Fleming/Deighton interview reads like something from a TV sitcom, though Fleming suggesting they refer to each other's characters in their books is definitely in character--he proposed something similar to Rex Stout and of course mentioned Nero Wolfe in OHMSS.
that was a good one @Revelator
I didn't realize Deighton was yet another former spy. I thought his background was in graphic design, where he met Hawkey. Seems just about every major spy writer then actually worked in the field. What's the official Secrets Act say about all these spies-turned-authors?
For folks who don't know about Len Deighton, @Barbel created this amazing Harry Palmer thread with lots more information on Deighton as well as the film adaptations.
Here is a photo of Fleming, Deighton and Hawkey together, which might have come from this same lunch(?) March 25, 1963 (photo from 007 Magazine).
Conversation at Scott’s
By Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle, May 16, 1963)
He was seated alone in the Window Room of Scott’s Restaurant in Coventry Street, his long, tapered fingers toying with a glass of white wine to which two teaspoons of water had been added.
“Sit down,” he said, half rising, the terseness of the words tempered by a smile that flickered for a warm second—no more—and was gone. It was obvious he had little time for small talk. After a quick but careful glance around the handsome Edwardian room, he leaned forward to ask the key question. “What will you drink?”
“Martinis,” we said. Swiftly assessing the cryptic word, he summoned a waiter with a commanding flick of his head. “Two martinis, very dry,” he ordered. “Four and 2 quarter parts of Coates’ Plymouth gin to five eighths of a part of Boissiere, the white vermouth. On the rocks. No lemon peel, no onion, no olive. Stir, don't shake.”
He turned his surprisingly blue eyes on us. Cold as sapphires, they shone out from a lean, ruddy face—handsome, if you like—that betrayed a few tell-tale signs of too many late nights at the baccarat table and perhaps more champagne (Taittinger blanc de blancs) than was strictly necessary. His luxuriant close-cropped hair was, I noticed, now completely gray. Again, he bent his supple, six foot frame forward.
“Cigarette?” he asked, offering a dull silver case surmounted by a curious coin. He caught my brief stare. “Gold sovereign,” he said. “My lucky coin at Monte Carlo. Made a killing with it.” The snakelike head of his Ronson Variflame flicked evilly and in a flash his cigarette was lit. As he took a deep drag, the neat polka-dot bow tie bobbed at the collar of his Sea Island cotton shirt with short sleeves.
If the foregoing sounds like a pallid attempt to imitate the style of Ian Fleming, creator of the James Bond stories—well, it is. The gentleman, described above, with whom we were taking lunch in the admirable surroundings of Scott’s, was Mr. Fleming, the successor to the Hammetts, the Greenes and the Amblers as the world’s best-selling author of international spy fiction. His hero, James Bond (No. 007 in the British Secret Service), has become a household word in most of our best households, including the one in the White House.
“Actually,” he said over the cold salmon, sliced no more than .007 of an inch thick, “I picked the name of James Bond because it sounded to me like the most commonplace name in the world. I first ran across it in Jamaica—a James Bond was the author of an obscure scientific book I was reading. What an unspeakably dull name, I said to myself. Just a step removed from anonymity. Now the readers think there actually IS a James Bond.”
“Do you know any good villains?” he inquired, flicking an ash off his blue suit (no pocket handkerchief). “Villains are the hardest for me. I was rather fond of Rosa Klebb, but, of course, I had to kill her off. Same with Doctor No.” I mentioned Blofeld, the evil fellow with the syphilitic nose who almost finishes Bond in his newest book, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, but Mr. Fleming merely shook his head over his lamb chops (pink in the middle).
“I kill off Blofeld in the next book, which I just finished,” he said regretfully. “An excruciating death. And as for Bond, I’ve got him in such a devil of a pickle I don’t know how I’m EVER going to get him out. Poor James.”
In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service the dashing Bond, who averages three affairs and an equal number of killings per book, marries a fine girl named Tracy. As they are starting out on their honeymoon in a white Lancia, the unspeakable Blofeld, in a red Maserati, races past and fires at them. At the end of the book, the Lancia has crashed into a field, “and Bond put his arm around her shoulders, across which the dark patches had begun to flower.”
“I hate to ask this,” I said, mindful of previous miraculous recoveries, “but is Tracy REALLY dead?”
Mr. Fleming poured himself a splash of vin ordinaire from a carafe and nodded sorrowfully. “Of course,” he replied. “Blood oozing out the back—sure sign. Too bad, but I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.”
He glanced at the stainless steel Rolex on his left wrist. “Really must go,” he apologized. “Catching a plane for Istanbul, where they’re filming From Russia. With Love. The first picture made from one of my books—Dr. No—has just been released here. Tremendous success. Made all its costs back right away, and I’m happy to say I have a small piece of the action. Sean Connery will play James Bond again—don’t you think he’s a fine Bond?”
We agreed. We had seen a preview of Dr. No and Connery seemed almost as good as the real thing. Mr. Fleming struggled into a luminous blue raincoat and led the way out of Scott’s into the gray London afternoon. As we searched for a cab, he pointed to a second-story corner window of the restaurant. “See that window?” he asked. When James is in London he always lunches there, at the corner table. That’s so he can look down and watch the pretty girls walking past.”
And with that, Ian Fleming—or is HE James Bond?—waved a cheery farewell and strode off into the anonymous crowd.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Note: The legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen was one of Fleming's early American fans and praised the books in his columns. Fleming returned the favor by writing an article, "The Case of the Painfully Pulled Leg," for the Chronicle in praise of Caen. After Fleming's death Caen devoted another column to him—extracts below:
Farewell to Double Nought Seven
By Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 1964)
I saw Ian Fleming for the first and last time in London, a little over a year ago. His penultimate [sic] book, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, was about to be published and the word was already around that in it, James Bond, the avowed bachelor, had married La Comtesse Teresa di Vicenzo, otherwise known as Tracy. “That's true,” smiled Fleming over lunch at Scott’s, “but of course I had to kill her off at the end. Nasty death, on their honeymoon. It wouldn't do at all for James to be married, you understand—a wife would just be in the way. I may have to kill off Bond one of these days, too—before he kills me. Plots are getting harder and harder to come up with.”
[…] I didn't realize how closely he identified with Bond till we got around to a discussion of the movie versions of his books (Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and next, Goldfinger). When we agreed that the actor who portrayed M., Bond's chief, was miscast, I suggested “You should play M.—you're about the same age, aren't you?”
Immediately, he looked hurt, and I clammed up. Obviously, he felt he had nothing in common with the aging sea dog who headed the British Secret Service. He gave me a long, cold, ironical look that would have done justice to James Bond.
[…] Spy critics poked fun at Bond's modus operandi—pointing out, for example, that no agent would smoke those special cigarettes with the three gold bands, so easily identifiable. They snickered at Fleming’s penchant for ticking off Bond’s clothing, smoking and drinking habits by brand name, never letting him forget that he misspelled Bond's favorite champagne—Taittinger Blancs de Blanc (he left the “s” off the first “Blancs”).
Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don't they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults.
Another excellent article. I picked up on the Caen / Fleming imitation quickly - was disappointed he didn't run with through the whole interview. While it isn't Fleming's voice, I enjoy Caen's summing up:
Fleming’s patient report to all this criticism was “Don't they have any sense of fun?”—and, in this gloomy, literal-minded world, Bond was fun, for all his faults.
Also interesting was Fleming's
I couldn’t keep Bond married, you know. He’s on constant call, has to be too many places, get into too many scrapes. Wouldn’t do at all.
as it seems to hint that far from being bored with his character, as he was around the time of FRWL, or condescending to him [hence TSWLM], Fleming's contemplating many more adventures. Maybe the thrill of competition [eg. Len Deighton from the previous interview] was spurring his inventive sides.
TMWTGG is only a half finished novel and would have benefitted from Fleming's six-months of spit-and-polish, but where we wonder might he have gone from there...?
Richard 'Dikko' Hughes's "Sayonara to James Bond" (in his book Foreign Devil) reveals that Fleming was extremely interested in researching and visiting the Panama Canal. Hughes believes Fleming intended to send Bond there, and only illness got in the way.
Also, a couple years after Ian's death Caspar Fleming became so interested in Egyptology that Ann Fleming accompanied him on a trip to Egypt. Had Ian lived he'd probably have accompanied them and might have accumulated enough material to make Egypt the location of a future Bond novel.
Fleming was also interested in the narcotics trade and tried interesting his publishers in a reference book on drugs (“every guest [at Goldeneye] says ‘what does ganja look like?’"). Marijuana features in TMWTGG and drugs might have played larger roles in future Bond adventures.
Lastly, two of the "Thrilling Cities" Fleming loved most were Hong Kong and Tokyo. He returned to Japan to research YOLT and perhaps would have returned to Hong Kong to research another Bond adventure if he'd lived longer.
Thanks for that. Some interesting notions.
Yes, it was just from memory of a discussion I had with others on CBn back in 2005 and we all know how fallible memory can be! I knew I probably wasn't remembering it correctly after 17 years. I seem to remember that my assertion that the Peter Evans stuff might've been partial fabrication came from something I noticed in the footnotes or references in Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Palgrave Macmillan, 1987) by Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott. That book is rather overly wordy and academic perhaps but there is some good information and analysis within it too, including the sales figures of some of the Bond novels.
@Revelator said
Fleming was also interested in the narcotics trade and tried interesting his publishers in a reference book on drugs (“every guest [at Goldeneye] says ‘what does ganja look like?’"). Marijuana features in TMWTGG and drugs might have played larger roles in future Bond adventures.
________________________________
did this proposed book have any connection to The Poppy is Also a Flower? Fleming is credited for "story idea" in that film, how much was he involved and how did he find time?
funny all these guests at Goldeneye asking Fleming about ganja. Purely for educational purposes I'm sure. I wonder of the British PM who stayed there also asked "what does it look like?" "hey Fleming man you got lots of connections, can you score some of that ganja so I can look at it?"
By all accounts the British prime minister in question, Sir Anthony Eden, (served 1955-1957) was on enough dangerous drugs as it was which goes some way to explain his irrational decision making during the Suez Crisis of 1956. His wife Clarissa Eden was a friend of Ann Fleming's and the Edens stayed at Goldeneye to convalese after the fallout from the Suez Crisis which took a toll on Eden's health and led to his resignation as prime minister in January 1957. The Flemings weren't there at the time that they offered it up to the Edens as a place to get away from it all for a while.
Good question. It looks like "Poppy" and the drugs book were linked concepts. Here's an excerpt from Fleming's letter to Michael Howard of Cape:
Dear Michael,
One sudden, brilliant notion.
I am surrounded by books of reference here – about birds, fish, shells, tropical shrubs, trees, plants, the stars, etc. etc. – but every guest says “what does ganja look like?” (marihuana)
Why not do a cool, well-illustrated book on the “narcotic flora of the world”? Expensive. Definitive. With medical effects, etc. I would certainly underwrite it. You can’t miss. Get cracking before Weidenpuss or Thames & Hudson do it. A £5 job.
I have spoken!
And here's Lycett on the poppy film:
...The Poppy is also a Flower, a film about the global drugs trade which Ian had originally discussed with Terence Young, the director of Dr No and From Russia, With Love. Drawing on his proposal for a narcotics handbook, Ian had talked of a story-line which followed the progress of an opium poppy from a flower in an Iranian field to raw heroin in the streets of New York. After Ian’s death, Young developed the theme with a writer, Joe Eisinger, who presented it to Glidrose as a possible Fleming film. Ian’s executors were unwilling to allow his name to be associated in any promotional capacity, though they were prepared to permit the use of the credit line, “The story is based on an idea by Ian Fleming”. The film, known in Britain as Danger Grows Wild, was released in 1966 with Terence Stamp as the swarthy secret agent in the lead role and Grace Kelly voicing an admonitory introduction on the dangers of drugs.
Though heroin had already made appearances in Fleming's work, it seems evident that he would have returned to the topic.
@Silhouette Man I agree about Bond and Beyond. It's the first proper academic study of the Bond phenomenon and is better written and more incisive than many other academic works, including most of those on Bond. The authors have a baseline of respect for their subject and aren't writing from a position of hostility, unlike several other academics I could name. The Twayne series book on Fleming, for example, is little more than a hit job.
@Revelator - I agree with your assessment regarding Bond and Beyond. It is a proper academic study of the inexact science of Bondology. I think the ball was started rolling fairly early on with the publication of Kingsley Amis's The James Bond Dossier (1965) though due to Amis's unpretentious nature when it came to genre fiction it was more of a mock-academic study of the literary Bond phenomenon than a fully academic treatment. Still, it did show to all concerned that if a post-war writer of Amis's stature could take the Bond phenomenon seriously and even go on to pen the first Bond continuation novel, Colonel Sun, then others could feel free to study the phenomenon more in-depth too. In my view Amis opened the door to all those who came after him, both in terms of Bond literary criticism and study and the Bond continuation authorship.
thanks @Revelator for the background info on The Poppy is also a Flower.
Fleming's proposed book sounds like what we would call an ethnobotanical field guide, except more specialised. Ethnobotanists look at other native uses of plants, but the field seems to be mostly concerned with pharmaceutic potential. Theres big money to be had discovering "new" pharmaceutical drug ingredients deep in the rain forest, and of course amateur enthusiasts are fascinated by the topic as well
The Spectacular Cult of Ian Fleming
Erotic scenes of torture and sex have brought fame to a quiet man who hates all violence
By Geoffrey Bocca (Saturday Evening Post, June 22, 1963)
In Doctor No, James Bond finally disposes of the wicked Communist doctor by smothering him in bird droppings. In Moonraker, the villainous Sir Hugo Drax is blown up by his own atom bomb. Oddjob, the torturer in Goldfinger, is last seen oozing out the window of a plane: “As if the Korean’s body was toothpaste, it was slowly sucked with a terrible whistling noise through the aperture.”
These and similar scenes of violence have been responsible for the sale of more than seven million copies of the James Bond stories—11 books in 11 years. Bond is almost essential reading in smart society and on college campuses. President Kennedy, Prince Philip and former CIA chief Allen Dulles are among his fans. Literary magazines acknowledge him as “every intellectual’s favorite Fascist,” and his creator as “the thinking man’s Mickey Spillane.” Parodies abound, and one 70-page paperback called Alligator, published by the Harvard Lampoon, has sold no less than 50,000 copies.
All this uproar naturally delights the tall, handsome, sardonic man who created James Bond. At 55, slowed in his movements by a heart attack two years ago, Ian Fleming has high cheekbones, close-set eyes, a bashed-in nose, and a rich taste for the luxuries of life. Each winter, he retreats from the London whirl and writes a new Bond novel at his beach house in Jamaica. Every afternoon he lies face down in the water, looking at the fish through his faceplate. In his manner he thinks out the plot, and contemplates the trick he has been playing ever since Bond was born.
The trick consists of having led his readers to believe that Fleming has modeled Bond on himself. Like Bond, Fleming is a former naval commander. The creator and his creation share a taste for vodka martinis, custom-made cigarettes, and, until Fleming’s marriage, unattached women. Dust-cover photographs of Fleming with it gun help the illusion. In fact, Fleming has created a character who is the opposite of himself. Bond, Fleming writes in every book, is “cruel.” The essence of Fleming’s personality is his gentleness. He abhors violence.
“I believe one has the right to kill only what one eats and nothing more,” Fleming says. This is scarcely an exaggeration. When Sir Anthony Eden’s health broke down after Suez, he and Lady Eden rented Fleming’s house, “Goldeneye,” at Oracabessa, Jamaica. On their first night there they were horrified to find giant bush rats scuttling around the house. “Commander Fleming does not like them to be killed,” one of the servants explained. “After all, they cannot help being bush rats,” Fleming reflects moodily. As the rats proliferated, however, Fleming was obliged to send local boys after them for the price of sixpence a tail, an execution order that sent him into a deep depression.
Fleming is so softhearted, in fact, that he finds it hard to reject a stranger’s request for money. And when a friend is ill he feels compelled to fill the hospital room with flowers, Fleming also has interests that Bond would scorn. Bond has never read a book, but Fleming is one of England’s principal authorities on rare books. He is publisher of the London Book Collector, perhaps the leading magazine in the world on the subject.
Fleming has an almost infinite number of quirks, prejudices and dislikes. Some are apparent in his form of dress, which he has not changed since he was demobilized from the Royal Navy in 1945. In London he invariably wears a dark blue suit with cuffs on the sleeves, a spotted bow tie loosely tied, a blue shirt with short sleeves, and loafers. “Wearing the same clothes saves me from having to wonder what I shall wear today,” he says rather defensively. “I hate buttons, studs and laces. I wear short-sleeved shirts because I cannot stand dirty cuffs.”
Fleming dislikes the theater because he feels he is held captive in the audience. He prefers movies because he is free to come and go as he pleases—“and they are cheaper.” He never watches television, and he detests flowers in his room. He hates cocktail parties. His wife, Ann, is a celebrated hostess and gives some of the best parties in London, but Fleming often succeeds in avoiding them.
Fleming protests constantly that he is not a gourmet like Bond, and that his favorite meal is scrambled eggs, but he cannot resist an adventure in exotic eating. The food does not have to be good, so long as it carries the spice of danger. Sometime ago. Fleming met an old friend from the Royal Navy, a polar explorer who had written a manual of survival for escaped prisoners of war.
“Can a man desperate from hunger live on grass?” Fleming asked him.
“Nobody can live on grass,” the explorer said.
“Suppose a Russian stood between you and starvation, and you killed him. Which is the best part of him to eat?”
“How should I know?” the explorer asked uneasily.
“I have been told that the palm of the hand is the tastiest,” Fleming persisted.
“No, no.”
“What then?”
The explorer looked about, then turned to Fleming, his eyes gleaming. “A cut off the ribs,” he said. “That’s the best part.”
This delights Fleming, for adventure is his passion. “Ian,” said one of his close friends, “is fundamentally a hero worshiper. He loves physical achievement in the face of adversity. It began in his awe of his elder brother, Peter, who had explored the Brazilian jungles, crossed the roof of China, and written fine books about his experiences. He worships Sugar Ray Robinson and Jacques Cousteau, the skin diver.”
These are the characteristics of Ian Fleming that are distilled into James Bond. This is the fundamental secret of Fleming’s success. No matter how fantastic his plots, he gives the impression that he knows what he is talking about. When he writes about SMERSH, the Russian spy apparatus, he writes from a background of several years in the Soviet Union. Two of his novels, Casino Royale and Moonraker, turn on desperate card games for huge stakes. Fleming can make the scenes authoritative because he is himself a fanatical gambler. He is also a six-handicap golfer. In Goldfinger Bond plays a game of golf with the diabolical Auric Goldfinger for $10,000—and, of course, wins.
Many readers complain of the torture scenes which keep bloodying his books, Fleming replies that these are exactly what happened to Allied agents during the war. He should know. He worked with Allied agents during the war.
Fleming was born on May 28, 1908, the second of the four sons of Maj. Valentine Fleming. M.P., D.S.O. His grandfather, Robert Fleming, was a private banker and a sometime associate of J. P. Morgan, His mother, Evelyn Fleming, was one of the most beautiful women in England, Like so many privileged children of the era, young Ian had a thoroughly unhappy childhood.
When he was eight, his father was killed on the Somme (Winston Churchill wrote his obituary for the Times). Fractious and needing affection, Ian was sent instead to an especially tough school which specialized in beating conformity into unhappy and rebellious children. He emerged reserved and arrogant, and went to Eton where he was confronted with a headmaster who, he said later, “had it in for the Flemings.” Eton didn’t work, and Fleming moved briefly to the military academy at Sandhurst, but he had no military inclinations. Another brief period at Munich, where he added fluent German to his fluent French, marked the end of Fleming’s formal education, and the beginning of the adventures which led to the creation of Bond.
Fleming became a journalist and went to Moscow as head of the Reuters bureau. Already, within the young, green Fleming, one could see the older, ever-curious Fleming peeping out. Many correspondents hated Moscow. Fleming loved it. He learned to speak good Russian, and he was endlessly fascinated by the presence of the secret police.
In those days almost the only possible “scoop” was an exclusive interview with Stalin, which every now and then he was prepared to grant. One day Fleming and Stanley Richardson of the Associated Press sent Stalin a joint letter, and to their astonishment received a personal reply. It was badly typed on a faulty typewriter and it said simply. “I am sorry I cannot see you,” signed “J. Stalin.” Though they had no story, Fleming and Richardson realized that the document did have a certain financial and historic value, and they agreed to play poker for it. Fleming won and still has it.
In 1939 the Admiralty—at that time perhaps the most alert of Britain’s fighting services—decided that it needed men like Fleming: multilingual, imaginative, fit. Called home and commissioned as a lieutenant, he worked as personal assistant to Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence. Much of his wartime work is still secret today, and most of the stories Fleming tells are farcical rather than daredevil.
On one memorable occasion when he and an assistant were required to question a captured U-boat commander to find out which routes the U-boats were taking through the British minefields in the Kattegat, Fleming had a flamboyant idea. Instead of grilling the commander in a grim prison office, why not soften him up by bringing him to London and questioning him over good food and fine wine?
The German and his first lieutenant, of unmistakably Teutonic bearing, were escorted to Scott’s Restaurant in Piccadilly in civilian clothes. Fleming and his aide were in uniform. Everyone spoke German throughout. Fleming ordered a bottle of Rhine wine and another and another. While the Englishmen were getting progressively drunker, the Germans stayed rigidly sober, revealing nothing. In the end Fleming gave it up and blearily took a taxi back to the Admiralty.
“Dammit, Fleming, what the devil have you been up to?” demanded the director of Naval Intelligence. “I have only just saved you from being arrested. You have tied up half of M.I. Five and the C.I.D. listening to you all afternoon.”
“Baker, the maitre d’hôtel, had reported that we had been behaving suspiciously,” Fleming recalls. “It showed an alert and proper attitude on his part, and I have patronized Scott’s ever since.”
On another occasion, when Fleming was on his way to secret talks in Washington in 1941, he stopped off with Admiral Godfrey at Estoril in Portugal. Fleming recognized German Intelligence agents in Estoril Casino playing chemin de fer. He decided to play them and take them for all of their secret funds. Instead of taking the Nazis, however, the Nazis took him, and Fleming sheepishly had to ask his chief for more travel money. This was to lead to the dramatic chemin de fer game which James Bond plays with the scoundrel Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. In the book Bond wins.
After D day Fleming took control, from London, of No. 30 Assault Unit, which was to become more celebrated among its members as F.P.N., or Fleming’s Private Navy. This was a group of some 300 Royal Marines who advanced with front troops to try to seize secret enemy equipment, codes, and so on. Despite the importance of Fleming’s secret war, he received no decoration at the end of it.
“He deserved a big one,” said one of the senior officers of the unit. “He would have got one if he had merely lifted a finger for it. But that is Ian for you. He will push with all his weight for one of his subordinates. He is always too indolent to push for himself.”
In 1945 Fleming was appointed foreign manager of the Kemsley Newspapers of London, then a rather somnolent Fleet Street newspaper group. It did not tax his intellect much, and left him plenty of time for golf. At the same time his private income was just enough to induce languor in someone not compulsively energetic. He was quite happy.
This enjoyable loafing ended in 1952, when, at the age of 44, he gave up bachelorhood and married Ann Rothermere, divorced wife of Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the London Daily Mail. The new Ann Fleming had enough dynamism. for both. “Horrified by the prospect of marriage, and to anesthetize my nerves,” Fleming later recalled, “I sat down, rolled a piece of paper into my battered portable, and began.”
He began with the words. “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired…” He called it Casino Royale. He deliberately gave his hero the least adventurous name he could think of. There is a real James Bond, author of a definitive work on birds of the West Indies.
It is now easy to see why the Bond stories have caught the popular imagination. Not only does Fleming write with great skill and verve, but there is a startling topicality about his work. Bond’s world of spy fantasia has proved to be no fantasia at all but a mirror of what is going on in the world. We know now that the Russians do build missile bases in nearby Caribbean islands (Doctor No). They do plot carefully to get beautiful girls into the beds of Allied agents (From Russia, With Love). Fleming said it first.
Fleming’s current novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, is set in Switzerland and gets Bond married. Now that another winter is over. Fleming is polishing up Bond No. 12, in which, he confided recently, “Bond becomes Bondo-San.”
In London, New York and Jamaica, Fleming moves in a small society of talented friends who think he can and should do better than write spy novels. Fleming listens to the criticisms with a sardonic grin, fits another cigarette into his holder, and goes his own way.
What he thinks of his own work, he does not say, but he shows no sign of changing. He much prefers lying face down in the Caribbean, with a hot sun beating on his back, his mind far away. Will James Bond outwit the evil crypto-Communist tycoon, Sir Basil Quicksnade? Will he escape the dastardly plot to tum the Washington Monument into cheese? Will he save the dazzling Avis Rearguard from the back seat of the flaming Alfa Romeo? Will he sell yet another million copies to the wishful thinkers of this world?
Thanks for that. Nice piece.
JFK Is James Bond Fan—Ian Fleming Autographs Thrillers for President
By Hal McClure (AP, syndicated in The Morning Call [Allentown, Pennsylvania] July 14, 1963)
How does it feel to be President Kennedy’s favorite mystery thriller writer?
“It’s quite flattering,” says author Ian Fleming, whose melodramatic adventures of British secret agent James Bond have sold millions of books throughout the world.
Fleming, who at 54 is a somewhat older version of his suave fictional hero, was sitting outside the tiny Turkish railroad station of Yarımburgaz, where recently a British film company was shooting the latest James Bond movie, From Russia, With Love. The author had come down from London to watch.
He brushed lank gray hair from his eyes and a smile creased his ruddy face as he recalled his only meeting with President Kennedy.
“It was six months before the 1960 election and I was introduced to them as they walked along a Washington street. Both Mr. Kennedy and Jackie asked me, ‘Are you THE Ian Fleming?’
“That’s music to any writer’s ears.”
The President recently placed Fleming’s From Russia, With Love, a spy thriller that starts in Istanbul and goes behind the Iron Curtain, on a list of books he has most enjoyed reading.
Fleming said he has not seen Kennedy since, but sends him autographed copies of each new Bond book. “It’s the least I can do,” he added.
How did he start the James Bond books?
Fleming was foreign manager (he prefers manager to editor) of the [i]Sunday Times[/i] of London when he began the series in 1952. He drew on his own experiences in British naval intelligence in World War II.
“I was about to be married after 43 years of bachelorhood and it had been a momentous decision for me,” he said, then quipping: “I suppose I needed a diversion to get over the shock.”
He wrote his first book in Jamaica on his honeymoon. In all, he has written a dozen books at his Jamaica retreat. He smiled and continued telling about his writing habits.
“I never look back when I’m writing,” he said. “That’s good advice for young writers. If you start correcting and revising the previous day’s work, you waste another day. I revise only after I've finished the book.”
He said it takes him about six weeks to write the first draft, turning out about 2,000 words a day in two stints—from 10 a.m. to about noon and from 6 to 7 p.m.
Has his books’ success changed his life?
“Surprisingly little,” says Fleming. He said he still contributes a piece to the [i]Sunday Times[/i] now and then and continues to make his home in England. He admits if it weren’t for the high British income tax he’d be a millionaire today.
Fleming writes lovingly and knowingly of gambling and good eating in the Bond stories and admits he, like his hero, likes to gamble.
But as for being a gourmet, “I’d as soon eat scrambled eggs.” He says people like to read about exotic foods and he continues to write about them.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Since this week's interview was rather short (in retrospect I should have just excerpted it in the short interviews post) I'm throwing in some pictures.
Here's Fleming adjusting the shelves of an airport bookshop to make his books stand out more:
Tatiana and her creator (taken in Yarımburgaz?):
The author and his character:
The author and his profits. I'd like to know more about this image--who was the photographer? Is there more from the photoshoot?
Thank you, @Revelator . And I love the pics.
Glad you enjoyed them! A kind soul on the MI6 board informed me that the last photo of Fleming was taken by Howell Conant. I did some googling and found another image that's probably from the same photoshoot:
Though last Friday's interview was short, this Friday's will be quite lengthy--and accompanied by more photos...
The Ian Flemings
The Improbable Domestic Backdrop, the Life, of the World’s Most Successful Writer of Thrillers—the James Bond Books
By Robert Harling (Vogue, Sept. 1, 1963)
I will start somewhere near the beginning of the legend as it came my way.
During the war, Ian Fleming, as Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, fathered and was put in charge of one of those private “armies” apparently inseparable from modern war, although Hannibal was doubtless plagued by them; Nelson, too. This unit, of which I was a member, was known generally as 30 AU, more formally as No. 30 Assault Unit, and finally, as No.30 Advance Unit, and was organized as a result of the direful experiences of the British in the battle for Crete, when a similar German unit captured valuable British secret material. The British, always ready to learn, however late, decided to copy this rewarding notion. Fleming maintained close control over 30 AU, a necessary procedure, for members of the unit sometimes seemed to think that the war was being waged for their particular entertainment.
On one of Fleming’s visits to the unit, in company with his chief, Vice-Admiral Rushbrooke, permission for 30 AU to operate with American advance troop under General Patton’s command was suddenly deemed necessary. Off we went. Patton was in one of his more histrionic moods. Like Garrick playing Hotspur or Massey playing Lincoln, he strode before us, explaining how he would pip the Allied Commanders to Berlin. Later, over our K rations, under an intoxicating euphrasy induced partly by Patton and partly by Calvados, the end of the war seemed imminent. I asked Fleming what he would then do. He replied simply and grandiloquently: “I shall write the spy story to end all spy stories.”
I thought this was a bit steep but let it go.
Nobody, of course, had better grounding for the task. Before the war he had worked as a special correspondent for Reuters and The Times. He had served under two Directors of Naval Intelligence. He had taught himself to write a spare and simple prose. Above all, he knew how fictionally preposterous are the true espionage stories. Altogether, a reasonably factual springboard later for his own brand of fantasy
But all this was long ago. Twenty years. And the James Bond books didn’t start appearing until ten years later. By then he was doing a fair-sized job as Foreign Manager of The Sunday Times and other newspapers, owned at that time by Lord Kemsley and now by Roy Thomson. In between he got married and that was a fair-sized job, too. As Fleming is, in spite of physical vigour and other outward appearances, a somewhat idle fellow, these, allied with these other activities, all helped to postpone the Bond saga.
He published Casino Royale in 1953, its successors at yearly intervals. Another has just gone to his publisher. The demand for them is apparently insatiable and world wide.
In the course of this melodrama of success, Fleming has changed very little physically, mentally, and all the rest. He has put on a few pounds and slowed down a few steps, but he remains what he was, a tallish man with black hair, now touched by grey, above a dark-skinned, strong-featured, deep-lined face. His eyes are blue and of a sharp and gay intensity. When moody or broody, he can look somewhat sombre and threatening, but the mood soon goes. Merriment will out.
He dresses well but simply. Navy-blue suits, heavy in winter, lightweight in summer. Blue shirts, black and white spotted bow tie, very occasionally a striped club tie. His suits and shirts are made, his casual shoes—he eschews buttons and laces—bought off the rack. In common with most Englishmen, he hates shopping and always seems mildly intimidated by salesmen, whether in gunsmiths or shoe shops. At weekends, he exchanges these scarcely formal London clothes for a simple wardrobe of pull-overs, hounds-tooth tweed trousers, and nut-brown leather casuals.
He is no fancy dresser, but is interested in his clothes and even more interested, perhaps, in the clothes of his friends, especially when touched by any dash of eccentricity. Being a direct man by nature, he is prepared to point out these oddities. “Why that high-buttoned Italian jacket?” he will say. “Carrying a gun or bicycle chain?,” the latter being amongst the more fashionable and lethal weapons sported currently by London thugs.
During his brief sojourns in winter London, he adds a fairly exotic black-and-white check tweed overcoat to his outdoor accoutrements, but almost always carries his hat, a battered soft black felt, which, when worn in a sudden shower, is seen to be a sinister rakish headpiece that would arouse George Raft’s envy. He professes to have reduced his wardrobe to the essential elements suitable for a man of sophistication and modest self-esteem, but one or two of his friends suspect that he occasionally hankers after a more exuberant wardrobe.
Because the minutiae of the so-called sophisticated manner seem to preoccupy Fleming in all his books, many critics have accused him of snobbery of a fairly material order, but Fleming is incapable of the self-conscious imprisoning dedication needed for snobbery. He doubtless has his personal alleyways of snobbery (who hasn’t?) but they would take a lot of unravelling and are not very obvious. In any case, leanings towards snobbery are usually attributes of those lacking in self-confidence or vitality (not always related qualities) and Fleming has an abundance of nervous vitality and is, above all, natural in his dealings with all, friends, acquaintances, enemies, bores, and nobodies. His voice is straightforward, English, unaffected. So, too, is his laughter. So, too, is his genial disregard for other people’s feelings. Scarcely the ideal equipment in any approach to snobbery.
The interest of James Bond in the subtleties of food, wines, guns, cars, and the other material oddments of the high life, with which his critics make much play, are not stressed in Fleming’s own existence. His breakfast is based upon good coffee and honey. The honey is Norwegian, which may sound esoteric but is not: he simply regards this Scandinavian variety as the best for his palate. His favourite midday meal in his favourite restaurant, Scotts at Piccadilly Circus, starts with a large Martini, followed by a dozen Colchester oysters (which he prefers because they are the biggest and the best) plus a Guinness, followed by a Scotch woodcock, which is just scrambled eggs topped by crossed anchovies. On a fiendishly wintry day he will be likely to choose steak, kidney, and oyster pudding—quite a dish. He also likes fillets of fish, grilled or meunière. Like any Englishman knowledgeable about food, he prefers plaice to sole, for it is a more succulent fish, although cheaper than sole. He has no sweet tooth, rarely tastes cheese, and, like most heavy smokers, is no trencherman, despite the fact that his housekeeper, Mrs. Crickmere, is one of the best cooks in London. Fleming is no wine drinker either. He prefers Martinis midday and, in the evening, fairly stiff potions of brandy and ginger ale or, not the drink of his forefathers, Scotch, but bourbon and water. He smokes too heavily. His cigarettes are made for him, not exclusively, of course, but he is against any of the well-known mass-production brands. He would like to cut down his smoking, but there it is.
He has always been interested in motorcars, personally and generally. Before the war he had a deep regard for the Invicta (now no longer made) and the Le Mans Bentley models. He has been through a tidy postwar collection. At first, they were British models, and even, for one day, a Daimler, but on his wife’s flick-knife remark that he looked rather like the late Queen Mary inside it, he swapped it forthwith for a racier model and has stayed racy ever since, moving steadily through the Detroit range of Thunderbirds to his present supercharged Studebaker Avanti. He also has considerable respect for the Mercedes stable, but thinks top handmade English cars are apt to be too fussy.
He has written at length about his passion for guns. This derives partly from schoolboy hangover stuff, and partly because he has enormous respect for all beautiful handmade objects, whether simple-seeming but complex steely mechanisms made to kill or enamelled golden Fabergé objects made to captivate.
Part of the recondite expertise which he provides in his books and which drives his critics into apoplexy derives from his deep-foraging interest in other people’s offbeat jobs. He will dig relentlessly away at the professional know-how of gunsmith, wrestler, geisha girl, engine driver, deep-sea diver, croupier, matrimonial agent, tightrope walker, or steeplejack. And as almost anybody will willingly talk about his job, Fleming gets his data.
He cannot bear to be bored. He likes companionship—on his terms. In spite of his obvious attraction to and for women, he prefers the company of men. He has an enormously juvenile sense of humour, and takes delight in bizarre tales with prosaic endings or [i]vice versa[/i], especially if the tales are of happenings to his friends. He readily appreciates a droll tale or quip: a friend confessing to “angst in his pants”; another’s contention that every French youth of sixteen owns three objects: “a moustache, a mistress, and a hoop.”
Fleming loves his friends dearly, particularly if they make no demands upon him. A reasonable request, for he makes no demands on them, apart from a hope for entertainment, and of this he gives as good as he gets. He keeps his disparate friends away from each other and they rarely meet. He has, say, a couple of friends in each of his several worlds: golf, journalism, gambling, Boodle’s (one of the half-dozen leading London clubs), publishing, finance. He spaces out his luncheons with them so that neither side is bored by too frequent a rendezvous. These meals and their pre-planning are important to him, though in general he prefers to eat alone. So, too, is the spacing-out and distance-keeping, for, although to his friends he is a warmhearted man, he also has a hard-rock reserve, a fairly formidable seam reached pretty early on in acquaintance with him.
Like most of us he has a yearning for affection, yet, like most Englishmen—or Scotsmen—of his kind, is ill-fitted by upbringing and habit to acquire the technique of affection-getting, which, after all, is basically a reflex of affection-giving. The English upper crust wants and needs affection as deeply as any other crust, but impulses towards this important emotional release are frequently stifled for them at about the age of eight when boys go away to boarding school. Affection by letter and postcard is as broken-backed as most other emotions by proxy. The boys grow up, professing to hate what they so need. Hence the undertones of sadism and masochism so frequent among British males. Hence, perhaps, those passages in the Bond books which have provoked such bitter attacks. Stuff here for a thesis by some psycho-quiz sophomore.
This imprisonment of the emotions is gradually being dismantled in Britain, but it gripped Fleming’s generation in steely handcuffs. Yet because emotion cannot be wholly buried in print and must out somewhere, somehow, Fleming’s temper is occasionally explosively violent. But, then, most Englishmen would rather admit to outbursts of spleen than affection.
His interests are basically mouvementés. He was an athlete at school and in early manhood and retains his interest in sport. He was a partner of Donald Healey, one of England’s more enterprising racing-car drivers before World War II. He has climbed and skied and sailed, but his first love was golf and remains so. This respect for physical achievement is reflected in his continuing capacity for hero-worship. He started by hero-worshipping his elder brother, Peter, a scholarly explorer-reporter. He continues to admire men who excel in games or endurance: Cousteau, the deep-sea explorer; Bannister, the first four-minute miler; Peter Thomson, the golfer; Heinrich Harrer, the seven-year-in-Tibet man; Douglas Bader, the fighter-pilot, who lost both legs in the war and leads as full a life as Lord Beaverbrook.
Yet he has interests far off from the sporting and strenuous life. I met him because of his interest in the complexities of typography, my own absorbing hobby, and I have travelled with him into one of the more derelict purlieus of London to track down brass reliefs of mythological gods and goddesses—he has the finest collection of brass pictures in England. He has similarly wandered with John Betjeman to inspect some of the lesser masterpieces of London’s ecclesiastical architecture.
He formed, with the help of Percy Muir, one of the most notable and knowledgeable of English bookdealers, a remarkable collection of books on milestones in original thought through the great revolutionary periods from the end of the eighteenth century. His wide and unique collection includes such rarities as first editions of Darwin’s Origin of Species; Einstein’s basic paper on the theory of relativity; Helmholtz’s monograph on the ophthalmoscope; Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?.
Muir, a long-time friend, vividly remembers Fleming’s succinct instructions: “You get the collection going. I’ll buy it, book by book, but I’m not very keen to do overmuch work on it myself.” Fleming kept to his side of the bargain without going back one whit on his word, Muir warmly said. The collection was valued some years ago by John Carter, the bibliographical pundit of Sotheby’s, the London auction house, at many thousands of pounds. He prefers the books. Another of his side interests is his ownership of The Book Collector, perhaps the world’s most erudite bibliographical journal, edited by John Hayward. Fleming has kept this magazine alive through thick and thin and cosseted the journal into its present valuable authority and financial stability.
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Fleming married in his early forties. This fact should not be taken to indicate either a lack of interest in women or a predilection for the celibate life. He had known many women, but had managed to elude them. As someone said: “Ian is like a handful of sea water; he slips away through your fingers—even while you’re watching.” Perhaps the girls were too undemanding, for when Fleming did marry it was only after a period of shattering personal complexities and tensions for himself and his wife, experiences which would have meant nervous breakdowns for lesser combatants.
Anne Fleming (née Charteris) was first married to Lord O’Neill (who was killed in the war in 1944), then to Lord Rothermere, from whom she was divorced in 1952. She married Fleming immediately she was free. As a simple “Esquire” he remained unperturbed in following these resounding titles, but promised his wife that if he ever became ennobled he would choose as his title “Lord S.W.1.,” the London postal district in which he lives.
Anne Fleming (known as “Annie” to her friends) is a slim, dark, handsome, highly strung, iconoclastic creature of middle height with a fine pair of flashpoint eyes. She has something of the air of an imperious gypsy, and I have always thought that long, multicoloured flouncing skirts would become her even more than those of more modish length. Suitably attired, she would, seated on the steps of a caravan, have made a magnificent addition to the late Augustus John’s paintings of the Romany folk of the Welsh Marches.
A woman of clear-cut views, Anne Fleming provokes extreme reactions as a wasp provokes panic. Her friends adore her. Others, intimidated by what they consider to be her ruthless vitality and unequivocal views on this or that, are more reserved in their response. She is certainly more interested in men than women, although she does have a few fairly close women friends, notably Lady Avon (wife of the former Sir Anthony Eden), Lady Diana Duff Cooper, and Loelia, Duchess of Westminster. But her main friendships are with men, or possibly with the minds of men, and she retains a bright schoolgirl’s undue respect for academic distinction and political achievement. Thus her closest friends include Somerset Maugham, novelist; Evelyn Waugh, novelist: Sir Isaiah Berlin, philosopher; Sir Maurice Bowra, classical scholar; Sir Frederick Ashton, choreographer; Cecil Beaton, artist et al; Malcolm Muggeridge, most ruthless of commentators; Noél Coward, playwright and songbird; Randolph Churchill, controversialist; Lucian Freud, artist grandson of Sigmund; Peter Quennell, poet and historian; Cyril Connolly, critic and wit. And so on and on. The list is lengthy and formidable. All these men delight in her company, savouring the occasional sharp edge of her tongue, but, even more, her talent for provoking others to dispute. Certainly she is not the kind of woman to whom men would be likely to bring confession of failure or weakness: they are more apt to come to her table to display their learning and to sharpen their wits.
Perhaps somewhat inevitably, with these intellectual predilections and companionships, Anne Fleming has taken a mildly dyspeptic view of her husband’s runaway success with his controversial thrillers. “These dreadful Bond books,” she has called them publicly, and there is no doubt she would swap a thousand James Bonds for one Stephen Dedalus.
Her marriage weathered one of its trickier moments when Fleming, returning to his house from Jamaica, overheard Cyril Connolly reading aloud to a collection of Mrs. Fleming’s intellectual guests, and with appropriate theatrical emphasis, extracts from his first Bond page-proofs. Yet being as socially energetic as she is, Anne Fleming seemed to enjoy, to the fullest degree, the revelry attendant upon the press showing of [i]Dr. No[/i], the first Bond adventure to be filmed, with Sean Connery as Bond. The evening party at Les Ambassadeurs, a night spot, was a rollicking fiesta which laid Fleming low, but gave his wife full scope for involving Somerset Maugham and a score of other improbable guests in a midnight frolic.
The Flemings started their marriage in a large Chelsea flat overlooking the River Thames, a far cry from his discreet bachelor mews house in Mayfair and her own in one of London’s largest mansions, Warwick House, Lord Rothermere’s house, overlooking the Green Park. The large flat, with its sometimes gay but more often melancholy outlook over the wide grey river, didn’t suit Anne Fleming’s mood or manner and they soon moved to a small Regency, cream-stuccoed house in London’s smallest square, about a hundred yards from the riding school of Buckingham Palace. There they have remained through eleven years.
The house is a particularly pleasant example of English urban architecture, even better adapted for living in today than when it was built, and, as it is one of two corner houses, with emphatically bowed windows, it has even more charm than its terraced neighbours.
[Photo of the house, taken in 2017]
Within, the house has a warm, welcoming, carefree air, resulting from a skillfully casual arrangement of comfortable chairs and sofas, Regency furniture, with a profusion of brass inlay, Fleming’s black Wedgwood busts, multitudinous books, and a highly individual collection of pictures, including paintings by Augustus John, Lucian Freud, Victorian lesser masters, and, of course, brass pictures of flighty goddesses and martial heroes.
[Caption:] Fleming's bedroom, above, has walls papered in bottle green, and such interesting bookmates as A Walk on the Wild Side and Firearms Curiosa; on the round table beside the bed, Lectures on Psychical Research; on the table in the foreground, Dangerous Marine Animals; Northern Underground; Science and History. On the bookshelves on the right: some of the Fleming collection of black basalt Wedgwood busts. The bedspread is a heavy needleworked portrait of "Regina Victoria, 1875."
This doll’s house has a bowed dining room that seats eight in comfort but must frequently take a willing dozen in diminished comfort, for Anne Fleming is perhaps the most naturally gifted and successful hostess in London, a position due chiefly to her own high vivacity allied with a simple belief that the perfect recipe for an entertaining evening is well-chosen, well-cooked food, good wines, and a group of egomaniacal talkers with diametrically (or, even better, diabolically ) opposed philosophies. The results are noisy, fierce, and memorable.
Fleming is rarely present at these dinner parties (or gab-fests, as he terms them) which are likely to take place at the rate of a couple a week in the season. Forewarned is forearmed, he claims, and at the appropriate moment, he is more likely to be settled in at the Portland Club, temple of gastronomy and the game of bridge, playing an expensive game with reasonably responsive results, than sitting at his own dining table. Returning at midnight, he is likely to find his wife’s guests still at table, still embattled in high-voiced political diatribe, abuse, and argument. Fleming, waving not too demonstrative a greeting, proceeds upstairs to his own room and comparative tranquility.
Occasionally, he openly pines for a quiet little mouse of a wife who might worshipfully await his evening arrival with carpet slippers and a large Martini, but au fond he is another man who needs to re-sharpen his wits from time to time and finds in his wife a ready sponsor for such an enterprise.
They are one in affection for their ten-year-old son, Caspar; less at one perhaps, in their hopes for this young man, for Anne Fleming believes that the highest destiny for any Englishman is to be Prime Minister, while it is certain that Fleming would settle for a lesser, and perhaps more permanent, career. Whatever bent the boy does eventually follow, lucre need not be his primary ambition, for he is the unknowing recipient of much of Fleming’s income from Bond.
By her first marriage, Anne Fleming had two children: a son and a daughter. The son is the present twenty-nine-year-old Lord O’Neill, the fourth Baron. Here, too, Anne Fleming had been daunted in her wish for a politically-minded son, for Lord O’Neill, a gay but self-contained and resolute young man, prefers life on his Northern Irish estates and running a large garage in Belfast to life among the metropolitan politicos. His sister, Fiona, was married three years ago to a young Foreign Office First Secretary, with a considerable reputation as a Russian and Chinese authority.
At this time the Flemings have completed another house in a fairly remote part of Oxfordshire. This new house has been added to the enchanting remains of a seventeenth-century house built by the side of a woodland lake of considerable bucolic charm. Here, the tale goes, Fleming will find the restful background he needs for writing his books, but others suspect that in truth he loathes the quiet sequestered life in England and prefers his present split-level life between London, various golf-courses, and the Caribbean.
Fleming does a good deal of his more ephemeral writing in a small office in Mitre Court, off Fleet Street, a courtway set amongst the chambers of barristers and the offices of journalists. There, for three or four days a week, he keeps more or less regular hours and copes with an avalanche of demands for his views on Life and Luv, revolvers and flick-knives, food and drink, travel and adventure. Here, too, he sees agents, interviews interviewers, and a growing tribe of film men. But his books are written in Jamaica.
He bought his Jamaican property in 1946, inspired by two wartime weeks conniving with the U. S. Office of Naval Intelligence to counter the U-boat offensive in the Caribbean. All those who have a dream house in mind yet can not draw should take heart from Fleming’s enterprise, for although he cannot draw a line, he designed his own house. And the house is the most practical and pleasant house any traveler could hope to find at a tropical journey’s end. Low-built, wide-eaved, wide-windowed, the house is proof against the snarl-up of the hurricane and the downbeat of the sun.
Here, for two months every year—January and February—Fleming is at his mellow best. The transplanted Englishman becomes a genial Caribbean squire. Here his yearnings towards a more exuberant wardrobe are given scope by recourse to an occasional shirt. For the rest it is life in shorts and sandals.
To his resident Caribbean housekeeper, Violet, every word of the master’s is both law and benediction. Every culinary whim must be indulged. Every possible comfort quadrupled. Here he works, with a fierce intensity, as he is one of those men who would rather work as a galley slave for two months than be a ten-till-six serf for eleven. And here the Bond books are written. “I’ve got this bloody man Bond half way up a cliff and must leave him there overnight if I’m to answer your letter. Well, here goes...”
Here, too, he swims for long hours above and between the reefs which ring his private beach. Once upon a recent time he was a keen underwater swimmer, but now, less adventurous, he peers at the nearer denizens, floating away the afternoon, dreaming up, for the pleasure of President and policeman, professor and popsy, yet more improbable situations for superman Bond to love in or escape from, all of which, according to rumour, will be translated into more languages than exist.
That's a lot of reading, I'm taking a break halfway through the second part. One of the best so far.
Glad you enjoyed the first half--I should warn everyone that a couple of even longer pieces (the Fleming-Simenon dialogue and the Playboy interview) are coming up soon!
That’s the best yet - full of detail, some of which is new to me.
Excellent, thank you for posting @Revelator
That was a fantastic read @Revelator I loved that it was written by someone properly familiar with Fleming, who could give guarded but detailed insight into the author's world. There's some hyperbole in the early sections and in the paragraphs about Anne, who Harling appears to admire perhaps more than his subject.
Some brilliant summaries of Fleming's day-to-day existence that could only come from someone blessed with the Master's genuine personal voice, not the public one.
Best line "ABOVE ALL HE KNEW HOW FICTIONALLY PREPOSTEROUS ARE TRUE ESPIONAGE STORIES" which fairly vindicates Fleming's style and sticks a finger at his critics.
The World of Bond and Maigret: Fleming Meets Simenon (Sunday Times, Sept. 15, 1963 and Harper’s Bazaar, Nov. 1964)
By Gordon Young
The low-slung black supercharged Studebaker Avanti which drove up one evening last month to the ancient Château d’Eschandens, outside Lausanne, was upholstered in rich black leather. It had self-powered windows, nine crimson-lettered dials on its dashboard and a top speed of 170 m.p.h. It is one of the few cars of its kind in Europe.
Its driver, Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was paying his first visit to Georges Simenon, author of 167 novels (forty-nine of them filmed) and creator of Jules Maigret. Their meeting had been arranged by Gordon Young, who recorded their two-hour talk, from which the extracts here are taken.
The scene is Simenon’s private study on the first floor of the château, his home. High-vaulted castle windows look out on to a quiet park; white walls are sparsely decorated with a few family photographs and a painting by Fernand Léger. (A Simenon portrait by Bernard Buffet is in the salon on the ground floor.)
In an alcove, racks hold Simenon’s twenty-four pipes and six great glass jars of tobacco. Ten more pipes are on Simenon’s inlaid antique desk, along with a pot full of sharpened pencils, four copies of the latest Simenon Penguin edition—and Simenon’s golden ball, on an ebony block. (Because Simenon needs something to play with while he thinks, Madame Simenon had this solid gold ball made for him by Cartier of Paris.)
Simenon, young and sprightly at sixty, sits at his desk in a spotless white open-necked wool shirt and flannel trousers. Fleming, casual, in a well-worn blue sports shirt and charcoal woolen cardigan, looks like Bond on holiday. Perched on a stool against the wall is Denise, Simenon’s French-Canadian wife and efficient business manager, in a beige woolen suit and brown-trimmed white silk blouse.
Fleming has just come back from playing in a golf tournament at Aigle and, since Simenon is a golfer too, Fleming begins easily with a wry account of his defeat…
Fleming: I was outsmarted. I always thought I was good off my handicap but somebody was better; an American. They were playing a most extraordinary competition…
Simenon: (talking excellent English, with a soft Maurice Chevalier accent) I played a round this morning. But every night when I’ve been playing golf during the day, I think “Why did I miss that shot?” and I try in my mind to find what was wrong, and it takes me an hour before I can go to sleep—and the next day I make the shot worse than I did the day before.
Fleming: I think one becomes too self-conscious. I know that when I address a ball I feel all my muscles, everything working, and I think how the shot is going to be and so forth. Well, that’s stupid; you’ve got to be an automaton, have a repeating swing.
Simenon: I'm not as lucky as you are—you have a 13 handicap. That’s not bad.
Fleming: It’s not very good. But I find golf a wonderful relaxation, anyway. It cuts you down to size and it can be hilariously dramatic.
Simenon: It's the only way after you’re sixty, and I'm sixty, so…
Fleming: Well, I’m fifty-five.
Simenon: You’re a young man.
Fleming: I read your first books in 1939 on my way to Moscow. I stopped in either Amsterdam or The Hague and there on the bookstall was a whole collection of those very good jackets you had in those days, those photographic jackets. I bought three or four to take to Moscow, and I absolutely adored them. And I think, of course, that if it hadn’t been for those jackets I probably shouldn’t have bought them for years. I think jackets are very important for books. But publishers don't seem to think so.
Simenon: Oh, yes, now they care a lot about jackets, especially in America. They study a jacket for weeks sometimes and try five, six, seven different jackets.
Fleming: Do they give you a chance to comment on your jackets?
Simenon: They give me the chance, but I don’t bother. I never worry about a book when it’s finished.
Fleming: Really? Don’t you like the way it appears and how it’s printed?
Simenon: Not especially.
Fleming: Oh, I’m very keen on that.
Simenon: As soon as the book is out of this room, it’s out of my life.
Fleming: What about correcting? I mean who does the correcting for you? Does your publisher correct and then send corrections back to you and suggest things or not?
Simenon: No.
Fleming: Nobody does?
Simenon: No.
Fleming: I find I make stupid mistakes which they correct.
Simenon: My publisher has not the right to change a comma—not even to suggest to change a comma.
Fleming: Very interesting. But I find I keep on getting into bad habits: I get a word which I use too often. At the moment I’m going through an awful period of using the word “just.” “It was just five miles away.” … “He was just going to get into his motor car,” and I keep on putting this damn word in. It’s like a painter who finds that he’s painted a "face" somewhere in his picture that everyone sees but him.
Simenon: I have exactly the same trouble—but the word changes for each novel. In one book I will always use the word “mais”—“but”—in another always “perhaps,” so it takes me three days to take out all the “perhapses.”
Fleming: Well, I do most of that myself, but I still find…you see, I’ve got a very good publisher’s reader, William Plomer, who’s a great poet and an extremely nice man, and he said some time ago that I never put in any exclamation marks. This stuck in my mind, and so in my last book I put in exclamation marks like pepper. And my publishers left them in. Now only yesterday I got a fierce review in The New York Times saying not only is Ian Fleming a very inferior writer but he has the girlish trick of putting in exclamation marks all over the place. I think a little help occasionally from a good reader is a very helpful thing. How many people read your manuscript before it goes to the publishers?
Simenon: My wife reads the copy every day, but she doesn’t correct anything and she doesn’t even speak to me about it.
Fleming: Well, my wife reads my books and also says nothing, but that upsets me.
Simenon: My wife reads the pages every day and then she doesn’t read it again.
Mme. Simenon: Well, I usually look at the proofs when they comes back.
Fleming: That’s what I mean. Who does the proof correcting?
Mme. Simenon: Well, I weed them a bit.
Simenon: I don’t even send away my manuscripts. When the manuscript has been corrected by me, instead of typing it again it’s Photostatted and it’s the Photostat which goes to the publisher. So the MS never leaves this house. I prefer some little mistakes to a too-cold correctness.
Fleming: Well, you write wonderful French. I read your books always in French when I can. You have one of the most beautiful French styles I know.
Simenon: Some French critics have said I have no style at all. And they are almost right, because what I have tried for forty years how is to avoid everything which is like literature.
Fleming: Not to be too literary? I agree.
Simenon: Yes. To stay as simple as possible.
Fleming: Well, you’ve always been like that. I think that, say, 100 years from now, you’ll be one of the great classical French authors. I’ve always said so. You’ll be the Balzac of…
Simenon: To tell you the truth I don’t care, because I won’t be there.
Fleming: Of course you’ve written novels, you see. In fact all your books are novels of suspense, whereas I write quite a different thing, which is the thriller, a thing of action and no psychology—except that the villain occasionally has to have some psychology to explain why he should be a villain. But I never try to examine my characters in depth, whereas all your books do that. I haven’t read all your books, but probably about fifty of them.
Simenon: I know what you write, but to tell you the truth I have never read it—for one reason, and that is that at age of twenty-five I decided never to read any novels again. And I haven’t read any novels since 1928. Not a single one. I have a lot of friends who are writers and they send me their books and inscribe them. I know your books from the critics, and that’s why I know you very well.
Fleming: Have you written about Switzerland?
Simenon: No, I very seldom write about a country where I live. It takes me a long time. For example, in the United States I waited almost six or seven years before I wrote about America. I prefer to be far away, to have some recul…You stand in Trafalgar Square or the Champs-Elysees and try to describe it in, say, a hundred words. It’s impossible—because you see too many details; you will have three pages instead of a hundred words. But if you are in Tanganyika dreaming about a glass of ale and Trafalgar Square or a terrace in the Champs-Élysées, you will in two sentences give the essential. And that’s why I prefer always to be far away from the setting.
Fleming: Quite true. I write all my books in Jamaica. I can’t really write anywhere else—because there’s a vacuum there and I can only write in a vacuum. I can’t do it in England—life simply won’t allow me to. My friends are quite uninterested in my writing—they think I can turn these things out in five minutes and that this is anyway not literature and therefore deserves no sympathy at all.
Simenon: Here we cut every connection with life around us when I am on a novel. Nobody comes here, not even relations, and I don’t go to town or even to the village. I walk in the garden, I count my steps, and I know how many kilometres I make a day just to get some fresh air.
Young: How long does that go on for—how long do you put yourself through that?
Simenon: It depends on the length of the novel, but not only that. It also depends on whether I write a book at the rate of one chapter a day or if I write a book like I did the last one—one day writing a chapter by hand, and the next day writing it over again on the typewriter. With some books I write in the afternoon one chapter by hand and the next day in the morning at six o’clock I rewrite it on the typewriter. That is what I call doing a book with two sittings a day. But for certain novels I write by hand for one day both morning and afternoon—only one chapter—and the next day I type it, so that takes twice the time. A novel in two sittings takes from eight to eleven days, and a novel with one sitting a day takes twenty-two to twenty-four days—that’s about it. And then the revision takes from three days to one week. I hate revising a book.
Fleming: I don’t mind revising because I feel the book is finished. I’ve done my work and I can play with it then.
Simenon: It seems to me so disgusting when I read my book over again; I say to myself but this is not at all interesting, nobody will read it—it’s so flat and dull and inconclusive. I hate that job.
Fleming: Well, I write straight on to the typewriter and I never look back until I get to the bottom of the page, because otherwise I’m so horrified while I’m writing at what awful piffle it is that I could never get on with it—I’d lose pace at once if I started correcting what I’d written the day before.
Simenon: I understand. I never do it until later; I work until the book is finished. That’s why I like the typewriter, because with the typewriter you don’t look back—you keep your rhythm. You spoke about style a little while ago. I consider rhythm as the definition of style—and the style comes from rhythm, like in music or painting. It’s a question of the rhythm, of the colour, and if you write and keep coming back on it again you lose the rhythm.
Fleming: And you lose pace. I think pace is very important. I think in books where there’s some sort of a mystery, people do want to get on; they don’t want suddenly to have to wonder what is the hero doing, why is he doing this.
Simenon: Yes, that’s even more important in the books you write than in the books I write.
Fleming: But then, don’t you feel that people get rather tired if Maigret, for instance, at the end of a book has to assemble all the suspects and examine them all and give the reader a chance to guess which is the villain? Don’t you have to be very careful not to hold up the speed too much?
Simenon: I don’t pay any particular attention. In most of the Maigret stories I think people know after ten or twenty pages who is the killer or whatever it is. I don’t like to have four or five suspects and have to choose between them. Do you think that the reader of today does still try to guess? I don't think so.
Fleming: No, that’s very old-fashioned.
Simenon: So you have to give them something else than just to guess. Even my children now guess everything after five or six minutes.
Fleming: Yes, that’s quite true. But of course we’ve still got in England the old-fashioned detective story—the Agatha Christie type of story, with the suspects and the poisoning and all the rest of it. I personally can’t read them, because I'm not interested enough in who did it. But lots of people, the Oxford don and the Cambridge don, go on writing this sort of book. Up to a point in America too—Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner. They’re all exactly the same, the Erle Stanley Gardner ones. I can’t read them. But Stout I always read because his Nero Wolfe is such a splendid monster.
Young: As an ordinary reader of both of you, and a great admirer of both of you, what I have always wanted to know very badly is this: To what extent have your own personal experiences been the basis of your writing? How much of your lives come into your books?
Fleming: Well, from my point of view, practically none at all, except through one’s powers of observation. I invent the most hopeless-sounding plots; very often they are based on something I’ve read in a newspaper. And people say, “Oh, this is all nonsense”—and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols. Last year a Russian spy got a heavy sentence for killing three West Germans in this way—with a water pistol. So I find constantly that things I’ve read about in some obscure magazine or somewhere are always coming true in real life. But I go around the world a lot—for instance, I set my last book in Japan. Well, I couldn’t possibly have done that unless I’d spent a lot of time in Japan.
Simenon: I never put a precise experience of my own into a book, but everything is experience to an author, every minute of his life. So I wouldn’t write the same books if I didn’t lead the same life. But I never consciously use something I know, or some person I know. For example , I know a lot of people, but I never think when I'm meeting somebody, “Oh, this one will be a good character in one of my novels.” It’s the same if I travel; I never travel as a writer, looking at somebody or taking notes; but twenty years later it comes back and I use it.
[To be continued in the next post]