As the year draws to a close, so does my stock of Fleming interviews. Here is the final one, which is also the only surviving motion picture recording of Ian Fleming. In early 1964, sometime between January and March, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent a team to interview Fleming at Goldeneye. The footage, clocking in at nearly half an hour, proved timely when Fleming died in August.
Below the video is a transcript of the interview. It was created by Caractacus Potts, who posted it in this forum back in 2020. This year I finally got around to double-checking the transcript and making just a few corrections. I wish to thank Caractacus for all his hard work--and for all of his delightful and informative posts.
Though there are no more Fleming interviews left for me to post, after the holidays I will produce a "best of" assembly of the most interesting passages.
...During each annual two month period at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming wrote a new book. Two thousand words in three hours every morning. Each one seemed to be assured of success. But was it, as some critics charged, because the books were heavily laced with sadism, savagery, and sex? Our interviewer asked Mr. Fleming how he reacted to these charges.
Ian Fleming: Well, I don’t mind very much. I expect the same thing happened to poor old Bulldog Drummond and the rest of them in their time. But the point really is that particularly since the last war, we’ve all become much more educated in what really is violence and sadism and savagery, and so on. And it’s ridiculous in this day and age to have one’s hero hit over the head with a baseball bat, when in fact one knows what happened in Auschwitz and all these other places during the war, Belsen and so on, and what technical tricks of torture and violence the Gestapo got up to, what the KGB gets up to now in Russia, what happened in Northern Africa—was it Algeria and Morocco?—these terrible electrical devices they used on people.
And so, as I say, to use the old Bulldog Drummond baseball bat, would be rather stupid, or it just wouldn’t be contemporary writing at all. As for sex, well, we’ve all got—sex is a perfectly respectable subject, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be as far as I’m concerned. In any case, I don’t overdo it in any way. There’s no four letter words and nonsense of that sort.
Munroe Scott: Do you feel these are necessary items—I refer to the sadism and sex—necessary items to sell thrillers?
Fleming: I don’t think so, no. But then of course I don’t admit to using sadism, I admit to using violence. But I think they’re part of life. All of history is love and violence, and I think it applies today almost as much to the great novels as it does to the normal thrillers, so to speak. But of course there are many different kinds of thriller writers, and many different kinds of thrillers, and I just have my particular line of country.
Scott: How do you feel about the kind of novel that has great sexual detail and an entirely promiscuous cast?
Fleming: Well, I must say—of course, I’m a certain age, so that the whole thing’s rather stale news to me. But I think it’s unnecessary, really, I think you can convey sex without using raw words very much better than you can than by using them. And I personally think this is only a phase that we're going through, and that the so-called sex novel that you see so much of nowadays will in fact go out of fashion before very long, when people simply get tired of the same old situations they know anyway.
Scott: You yourself refer to the fact that you don’t use the Anglo-Saxon four letter words. I take it you disapprove of that in literature?
Fleming: I suppose it’s some streak of my Scottish Puritan forebearers, but I don’t like seeing them on the page, somehow. I use quite a lot of them when playing golf for instance, but I certainly don’t like seeing them on the page, and I think they hold up the reader’s cursive interest in the book, in a way. They sort of say, “Oh lord,” you know, “what’s that?” And then maybe they go on or maybe they throw the book aside. But I think it’s a bad literary device to use four letter words.
Scott: Certain people are always criticizing novels with sex and violence in them, on the basis that they’re going to corrupt our youth. How do you feel about that?
Fleming: They’re meant for warm blooded heterosexual adults, you know, in beds and railway trains and aeroplanes, they’re not meant for schoolboys.
Scott: Teenagers presumably are reading them, however.
Fleming: Oh yes, they are, and I think they’re enjoying them very much. My son hasn’t yet got to read them, and he’s about eleven and a half. He thinks they’re very dull.
Scott: In one of the books you have Bond referring to his own, basically, dirty life.
Fleming: Yes, well of course spying is a dirty trade, and we all know it. Khrushchev has said so and so has Allen Dulles.
[A nearby bird starts chirping]
And in England we don’t talk much about our secret service, but I know we could say the same about if we were asked. But of course, spying is in fact a dirty, dirty trade. So is private detective work, and all that underworld of policemanship is a dirty life, let’s face it. And James Bond is engaged in a dirty trade.
Scott: Well, why do you think a hero who engages in a dirty trade, and leads a basically dirty life, has become so popular with the reading public?
Fleming: Well, it’s very difficult to say. I think perhaps because the books have pace and plenty of action, and espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard as rather sort of a very romantic affair [the bird begins to overwhelm the conversation], you know, since the first days when spies from the other side lifted up the tent flaps and listened to the plans of the Arab chieftains, and tried to get away with it. Spying has always been regarded as a very romantic, one-man job, so to speak. One man against a whole police force or an army.
[The bird continues interrupting]
Scott: Do we have a neighbor?
Fleming: Forgive this bird, but in Jamaica we have these kling-klings, and they make this tremendous racket. Buzz off!
Scott: [Chuckles] Do you feel there’s a need for heroes, extravagant heroes, like James Bond?
Fleming: Well, I think particularly today, this is the age of the anti-hero. And everybody’s trying to debunk the great, for no reason that I can particularly see. But they do sell, and as you know, all these satires, films, plays, television, radio, shows, all over the world, they’re trying to sort of knock down the idols, idols of the present or past. And of course they’ll end up by knocking down God, if they go on as fast as they’re going.
And I think this is personally a great mistake, because I’ve got plenty of heroes in my life: people like Winston Churchill, and heaven knows how many other people I’ve met during the war. And I think that although they may have feet of clay, we probably all have and all human beings have, and there’s no point dwelling entirely on the feet. There are many other parts of the animal to be examined. And I think that people like to read about heroes.
Scott: Mr. Fleming, in your books, there’s a great amount of detail. Two kinds of detail: sort of travelogue detail, and espionage detail. Is this detail based on personal experience? Do you make it up? Where does it come from?
Fleming: Well, I can say it’s 90% from personal experience, really. I wouldn’t say the espionage detail is, because although I worked in Naval Intelligence during the war and got mixed up in a lot of shenanigans, if I started sticking too close to the true espionage work of today I should be in trouble with the Official Secrets Act in England, even supposing I had access to information.
So a lot of the espionage detail is either invented, or taken from, very often, cases which have been brought between let’s say the West Germans and the Russians, the KGB. Or incidents that have occurred all over the world in the espionage field. And of course the whole battle goes on the whole time, so there’s plenty of material in that direction.
As for the background, I can’t very well write about anywhere I haven’t seen myself. And being basically a reporter by trade, I have got a good strong visual sense for background and interesting detail and so on, which I try to bring into my books, just in order to make them seem more valid and truthful.
And of course if you’re up on some tremendous plot, with heaven knows what, James Bond and a hat full of some terrible villains, if he can use a Ronson lighter, let’s say, or drive a Bentley motorcar, or stay in the Ritz Hotel, this all brings the reader back to earth.
Scott: You mentioned that you were a newspaperman.
Fleming: Yeah. Yes, I started off in Reuters, the international news agency, at the age of about 23, and served with them for about four years in London and Berlin and Moscow. I found I wasn’t earning enough money in journalism, as I expect you probably find also, and I went into The City to try and make some more. And I wasn’t very good in The City, and so I went back to The Times, actually, The London Times, and got them to send me off to Moscow in 1939, just before the War broke out, actually in January or February of 1939.
And then I served in Naval Intelligence as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence throughout the War. Under two directors. And I had great fun and went round the world twice, and got involved in a lot of escapades, which were very exciting at the time. And after the War—
Scott: —What kind of escapades?
Fleming: Well, actually, part of the main plot of my first book, Casino Royale—the gambling sequence where Bond out-gambles a Russian agent and bankrupts him—stems from something that happened to me on the first time I went with my Director, Admiral Godfrey, to Washington in plainclothes before America came into the War. And we took the long route down, the flying boat, down by Lisbon and Africa and then across to South America and up that way. And on our first night in Lisbon, we talked to some of our Secret Service chaps there, and of course they were interested in hearing our views and we were interested in hearing theirs, because Lisbon was a great center of German espionage. And they said, well if you want to see these agents of the Abwehr, as they call them, you will find most of them gambling at the casino at Estoril.
And I suddenly had the brilliant idea that I would take on these Germans and strip them of their funds, thus making a small dent in the secret treasury of the Abwehr. So I sat down at the table, and banco’d one of the Germans once, and lost, and I banco’d him again, and lost again, banco’d him for the third time and I was cleaned out. So that wasn’t a very successful exploit. But it was on the basis of this real-life episode that I based the big gambling scene in Casino Royale.
Scott: And Bond actually repeated that and was only saved by the American agent giving him money.
Fleming: Yes, that’s right [laughs], quite right. Absolutely right.
Scott: When you react to a place like, say, Paris—or when Bond reacts to Paris—do I take it that is actually the way you felt about Paris?
Fleming: Ah yes it is. I gave Paris a bit of a pasting, I remember, in one of my short stories, and complained that it hadn't been the same thing since the war, since the occupation. And all these observations are really of course observations of my own, which I put into Bond’s mouth or mind.
Scott: In one or two of your books, you have some brief descriptions of Canadian scenes. Now I find that these tend to be much less colorful than your descriptions of other areas of the world. I’m wondering if this is because you have found Canada a colorless place?
Fleming: No, the main reason is I’ve been very little in Canada. I was there during the war two or three times on rather hasty missions, Naval Intelligence work. But I simply haven’t had the chance to visit Canada, and visit the romantic parts of Canada. I could imagine that Toronto would make a tremendous locale for a gangster story for instance, these days, from what I read in the newspapers.
Scott: Oh, you’ve got the impression we have gangsters in Toronto, do you?
Fleming: Well, that’s simply what I read in the English newspapers. I’m merely giving that as an example of a town that undoubtedly, if I wished to set a gangster story in Toronto, it would be a suitable locale to use.
Scott: In the books, you describe little foibles of Bond’s, things he likes or dislikes. Usually things he dislikes, things like tea and Windsor knots. Are these your dislikes?
Fleming: Yes, they are. Yeah.
Scott: Are you given to many, and strong dislikes?
Fleming: I think so. They are sort of foibles, you know, but tea I regard as practically the downfall of the British Empire, and a tie with a Windsor knot I find much too tidy. I think, you know, it shows that a man is rather vain, I think, if he uses a Windsor knot in his tie. So I put these in as they sort of build up, perhaps, the character of James Bond to a certain extent, and I’m rather amused of course to put forward my own little quirks in prose.
Scott: How did the Empire founder on tea?
Fleming: Well, I think that people are always drinking the damned stuff. I remember during the war, you know, sort of four o’clock came in the middle of some tremendous naval action and then these bloody tea trolleys used to come rumbling down the corridor of the Admiralty, and somehow everybody used to stop work. That’s an exaggeration.
Scott: Mr Fleming, how does an author tackle the problem of selecting a name for the hero of his stories?
Fleming: Well, it isn’t rather the hero. I simply pick up names just driving through the countryside, through villages and so on. You see an interesting name over a tobacconists or chemists, or something of that sort, in any country in the world. But when I started to write these books in 1952, I wanted to find a name which wouldn’t have any of the sort of romantic overtones, like Peregrine Carruthers or who it might be, I wanted a really flat, quiet name. And one of my bibles out here is James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, which is a very famous ornithological book, indeed. And I thought, well "James Bond," now that’s a pretty, quiet name. And so I simply stole it and used it.
Scott: Mr. Fleming, I appreciate that in any book, and particularly in a thriller, you need a villain. You have a collective villain in most of yours, or in a lot of yours, the Russians. Do you really feel they are as bad as you paint them?
Fleming: Well the trouble is, as any thriller writer will tell you, the villain is a very difficult man to find anywhere. Because if one is a fairly intelligent person, one knows that a villain really probably has a psychopathic background, and if you paint in a psychopathic background you will immediately make the reader rather sorry for him, make him a sick man, which of course most villains are.
And the Russians have behaved in a very villainous way since the war, in many respects. I mean it was only last year there was a case brought against a Russian agent in Karlsruhe who confessed to having killed three West Germans with a cyanide water pistol. That’s a water pistol full of cyanide, pure cyanide, which leaves no trace. He generally shot the man going up a staircase and with this spray—and the man fell down instantly dead. And after a very short while the cyanide fumes disappeared, and probably the autopsy said that he died of a heart attack climbing the stairs.
And this man had been sent to kill a third man, or fourth man, I can’t remember quite which, and his nerve broke, as it often does with killers, and he confessed. And he got seven or eight years and so on and so forth because of his confession. Now that’s a very villainous act! And so if the Russians go on with this sort of joke, you know, I shall have to pursue them.
But before the War of course, the Germans were always set as the villains in our thrillers. And I think nearly all Bulldog Drummond’s villains were Germans. But I rather liked the Russians; I worked there twice, and they are a very great people and I don’t want to rag them too much. And maybe before long I shall have pushed off towards China, but they’re a very great people too, and so I’m rather hard put to it. It’s a very difficult thing to get these villains to grow on trees.
Scott: Why do you say before long you may be pushed off towards China?
Fleming: Well, simply because I think there’s a tremendous relaxation in Russia, and that the West and Russia, perhaps even this year, may get very much closer together. That’s my feeling, just my nose. And if that is going to happen, if peace is going to break out, well the last thing I want to do is to provide any hindrance to the process.
Scott: When you say closer together, do you mean just closer together just at the conference table, or do you think that there is a changing of political ideas and ideals?
Fleming: Oh, I think there’s a tremendous melting of the ice floe in Russia itself. And I think they’re moving towards something like the brand of extreme Socialism that we have in the extreme left wing in England and elsewhere in Europe. And I think before long that it will all end up with more or less the same brand of Socialism. That may be wishful thinking, but that’s how I see the general pattern of history probably working out. Because certainly Communism is breaking down in its machinery very badly, as we all know from the bad crop situation this year in Russia. And of course, it may be a very long process, but I can’t help feeling that probably that is the way of history.
I personally don’t believe there'll ever be an atomic war, because I think war’s gone out of fashion. This whole business of killing millions and millions of people, either with one weapon or another, I think has become old fashioned, and may cease to be a form of human activity altogether, if everybody can become civilized at the same rate.
But of course, that is not possible, and we have a lot of dangers that some lunatic like Castro, or perhaps one of the new African states, may suddenly get hold of nuclear weapons and start pressing the world, and, you know, playing around with these things. And so what we’ve really got to do is to try and ensure that the climate of history moves equally all over the world. Let’s hope that the Chinese, for instance, will shortly be caught by—infected by—the general atmosphere which I see. I don’t know whether I’m right or not.
Scott: You approve, I presume, of the French trend now to recognize Red China?
Fleming: Oh yes, I think it’s ridiculous. Here is one of the greatest nations in the whole history of the world, with what, 500 million people, and you can’t just wipe it off the map. I think, with any luck, in a year or two China will be a full-blooded member of the United Nations, and completely accepted as a member of the comity of nations. It’s ridiculous of course that this huge vacuum should exist on the map, really. They’re wonderful people; they may be politically misguided in our view but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very fine people.
Scott: A moment ago you referred to Castro as a madman. With Cuba only 90 miles away from you here, is James Bond not afraid of revolution being exported to Jamaica?
Fleming: Well, they’re trying, in a way. They’re putting over a great deal of revolutionary propaganda on the radio, as they are to all the Caribbean states and Central American states. But the Jamaican, if he hears politics being talked on the radio, he’s likely to turn it off and get on to music, you know. He doesn’t really want anybody’s politics.
Scott: In one of your books, you refer to a cab driver “born into the buyer’s market of the Welfare State in the age of the atomic bomb and space flight. For him, life was meaningless.” This is a pretty gloomy view of the Welfare State, etc.
Fleming: Well, I think it’s an exaggeration. I described the young man as a bit of a Beatnik and I was trying to say, which I personally believe, that while the Welfare State has brought us a lot of very worthwhile dividends, particularly in the shape of medicine and so forth, and the basic necessities of life, it has featherbedded the ordinary man in the street, to my mind to too great an extent. I think this is recognized by politicians everywhere, but of course once you start on welfare statism, it’s very difficult to slow down the process.
And when you get a chicken in every pot then the next government has to offer a chicken and a half in every pot, and so on and so forth, and so it goes on. And I think it’s rather inclined to make everybody spectators rather than competent, let’s say, in sport and so on and so forth. They don’t take part in much; they just go and spectate. And of course with television and so on nowadays—with all due respect to you—people would rather sit at home and not get out in the fresh air.
But I think nowadays, a lot of people are rather inclined to sort of wander around and get bored, and boredom is the worst sin, of course, for the human being. Really, it’s the worst thing that can happen to them, boredom.
Scott: Does this then, to take us around to a reason for James Bond being so popular, in that he always has a goal?
Fleming: I think it probably does, in a way. He starts with a straightforward one and he goes for it in a fairly straightforward fashion. And I think people like the action.
Scott: Is it possible that one of these days we will read a James Bond novel in which the hero is killed at the end?
Thank you Revelator and Caractacus for this brilliant transcript. Some very interesting political viewpoints that I won’t go into as that sort of thing is banned on here.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
thats excellent @Revelator , I was worried you forgotten that one
I remember it took me most of two weeks to transcribe it completely, one hour a night after supper. Flemings a mumbler and some of the most important bits I had to listen to ten times or more before being confident what he was trying to say
when I first posted my version in another thread, @Barbel suggested Fleming was in the middle of writing Man with the Golden Gun, and was inspired to write the scene where Scaramanga shoots the kling-klings because the bird had interrupted his interview!
I dont think I've reread this since the new film came out: the interview ends with Fleming being asked if he'd ever end a book the same way the movie ended!
Revelator I like the idea of a "best of" interview quotes: Flemings got his stock answers and anecdotes he seems to repeat every interview, so itd be good to highlight the more unique information he may only have given once or twice
Coolhand: I don't think there would be a problem in discussing Fleming's politics, so long as we did so in a neutral manner.
Caractacus: I am an elephant, I never forget! Actually I was hoping one or two more interviews might turn up before I used the CBC one as a finale, but that didn't happen. I annually transcribe recordings of board meetings to produce Minutes, so I can sympathize with your travail.
Barbel's theory is a good one, though I'd like to think Fleming was too much a bird lover for the influence to be anything other than subconscious.
I was also struck by the ending. Fleming liked to frequently complain about two things--being out of inspiration and needing to get rid of Bond--but I don't think he was serious about either. The original typescript of FRWL ended with Bond in perfect health and Klebb defeated, so it's arguable that the cliffhanger ending was put in to raise readers' interest in Bond's return. And in his letters to concerned readers Fleming always reassured them Bond had survived. Furthermore, if Fleming really wanted to get away from Bond, he would have invented other heroes instead of persistently returning to 007.
Fleming indeed liked to repeat the same stock answers and anecdotes, especially since interviewers tended to ask the same general questions. A pity he didn't live long enough to be interviewed by one of us!
AJB: Thank you for consenting to be interviewed by us, Mr Fleming - oh, we should say Sir Ian now, shouldn't we?
Fleming: Yes, it was nice of the King to hand me a title. I suppose his mother had disapproved of my books.
AJB: All 74 of them.
Fleming: Is that right? I stopped counting some time ago.
AJB: It’s remarkable that you're still with us at 116, considering you're drinking a half bottle of spirits daily, not to mention smoking 70 cigarettes and making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women
Fleming: Oh, I'm still fit. I was tap dancing with Dick Van Dyke just the other day.
Barbel knows the location of the Valley of the Blue Moon, Fleming went there to escape McClory, Elvis is there (not in a chip shop) etc. etc. he’s met them all 😁
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Comments
I'm sure that I've read about this in one of the Fleming bios, but can't bring it to mind.
As the year draws to a close, so does my stock of Fleming interviews. Here is the final one, which is also the only surviving motion picture recording of Ian Fleming. In early 1964, sometime between January and March, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent a team to interview Fleming at Goldeneye. The footage, clocking in at nearly half an hour, proved timely when Fleming died in August.
Below the video is a transcript of the interview. It was created by Caractacus Potts, who posted it in this forum back in 2020. This year I finally got around to double-checking the transcript and making just a few corrections. I wish to thank Caractacus for all his hard work--and for all of his delightful and informative posts.
Though there are no more Fleming interviews left for me to post, after the holidays I will produce a "best of" assembly of the most interesting passages.
***
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mJsrBPXdFc
Ian Fleming: The Brain Behind Bond
(Explorations, CBC, Aug. 17, 1964)
...During each annual two month period at Goldeneye, Ian Fleming wrote a new book. Two thousand words in three hours every morning. Each one seemed to be assured of success. But was it, as some critics charged, because the books were heavily laced with sadism, savagery, and sex? Our interviewer asked Mr. Fleming how he reacted to these charges.
Ian Fleming: Well, I don’t mind very much. I expect the same thing happened to poor old Bulldog Drummond and the rest of them in their time. But the point really is that particularly since the last war, we’ve all become much more educated in what really is violence and sadism and savagery, and so on. And it’s ridiculous in this day and age to have one’s hero hit over the head with a baseball bat, when in fact one knows what happened in Auschwitz and all these other places during the war, Belsen and so on, and what technical tricks of torture and violence the Gestapo got up to, what the KGB gets up to now in Russia, what happened in Northern Africa—was it Algeria and Morocco?—these terrible electrical devices they used on people.
And so, as I say, to use the old Bulldog Drummond baseball bat, would be rather stupid, or it just wouldn’t be contemporary writing at all. As for sex, well, we’ve all got—sex is a perfectly respectable subject, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be as far as I’m concerned. In any case, I don’t overdo it in any way. There’s no four letter words and nonsense of that sort.
Munroe Scott: Do you feel these are necessary items—I refer to the sadism and sex—necessary items to sell thrillers?
Fleming: I don’t think so, no. But then of course I don’t admit to using sadism, I admit to using violence. But I think they’re part of life. All of history is love and violence, and I think it applies today almost as much to the great novels as it does to the normal thrillers, so to speak. But of course there are many different kinds of thriller writers, and many different kinds of thrillers, and I just have my particular line of country.
Scott: How do you feel about the kind of novel that has great sexual detail and an entirely promiscuous cast?
Fleming: Well, I must say—of course, I’m a certain age, so that the whole thing’s rather stale news to me. But I think it’s unnecessary, really, I think you can convey sex without using raw words very much better than you can than by using them. And I personally think this is only a phase that we're going through, and that the so-called sex novel that you see so much of nowadays will in fact go out of fashion before very long, when people simply get tired of the same old situations they know anyway.
Scott: You yourself refer to the fact that you don’t use the Anglo-Saxon four letter words. I take it you disapprove of that in literature?
Fleming: I suppose it’s some streak of my Scottish Puritan forebearers, but I don’t like seeing them on the page, somehow. I use quite a lot of them when playing golf for instance, but I certainly don’t like seeing them on the page, and I think they hold up the reader’s cursive interest in the book, in a way. They sort of say, “Oh lord,” you know, “what’s that?” And then maybe they go on or maybe they throw the book aside. But I think it’s a bad literary device to use four letter words.
Scott: Certain people are always criticizing novels with sex and violence in them, on the basis that they’re going to corrupt our youth. How do you feel about that?
Fleming: They’re meant for warm blooded heterosexual adults, you know, in beds and railway trains and aeroplanes, they’re not meant for schoolboys.
Scott: Teenagers presumably are reading them, however.
Fleming: Oh yes, they are, and I think they’re enjoying them very much. My son hasn’t yet got to read them, and he’s about eleven and a half. He thinks they’re very dull.
Scott: In one of the books you have Bond referring to his own, basically, dirty life.
Fleming: Yes, well of course spying is a dirty trade, and we all know it. Khrushchev has said so and so has Allen Dulles.
[A nearby bird starts chirping]
And in England we don’t talk much about our secret service, but I know we could say the same about if we were asked. But of course, spying is in fact a dirty, dirty trade. So is private detective work, and all that underworld of policemanship is a dirty life, let’s face it. And James Bond is engaged in a dirty trade.
Scott: Well, why do you think a hero who engages in a dirty trade, and leads a basically dirty life, has become so popular with the reading public?
Fleming: Well, it’s very difficult to say. I think perhaps because the books have pace and plenty of action, and espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard as rather sort of a very romantic affair [the bird begins to overwhelm the conversation], you know, since the first days when spies from the other side lifted up the tent flaps and listened to the plans of the Arab chieftains, and tried to get away with it. Spying has always been regarded as a very romantic, one-man job, so to speak. One man against a whole police force or an army.
[The bird continues interrupting]
Scott: Do we have a neighbor?
Fleming: Forgive this bird, but in Jamaica we have these kling-klings, and they make this tremendous racket. Buzz off!
Scott: [Chuckles] Do you feel there’s a need for heroes, extravagant heroes, like James Bond?
Fleming: Well, I think particularly today, this is the age of the anti-hero. And everybody’s trying to debunk the great, for no reason that I can particularly see. But they do sell, and as you know, all these satires, films, plays, television, radio, shows, all over the world, they’re trying to sort of knock down the idols, idols of the present or past. And of course they’ll end up by knocking down God, if they go on as fast as they’re going.
And I think this is personally a great mistake, because I’ve got plenty of heroes in my life: people like Winston Churchill, and heaven knows how many other people I’ve met during the war. And I think that although they may have feet of clay, we probably all have and all human beings have, and there’s no point dwelling entirely on the feet. There are many other parts of the animal to be examined. And I think that people like to read about heroes.
Scott: Mr. Fleming, in your books, there’s a great amount of detail. Two kinds of detail: sort of travelogue detail, and espionage detail. Is this detail based on personal experience? Do you make it up? Where does it come from?
Fleming: Well, I can say it’s 90% from personal experience, really. I wouldn’t say the espionage detail is, because although I worked in Naval Intelligence during the war and got mixed up in a lot of shenanigans, if I started sticking too close to the true espionage work of today I should be in trouble with the Official Secrets Act in England, even supposing I had access to information.
So a lot of the espionage detail is either invented, or taken from, very often, cases which have been brought between let’s say the West Germans and the Russians, the KGB. Or incidents that have occurred all over the world in the espionage field. And of course the whole battle goes on the whole time, so there’s plenty of material in that direction.
As for the background, I can’t very well write about anywhere I haven’t seen myself. And being basically a reporter by trade, I have got a good strong visual sense for background and interesting detail and so on, which I try to bring into my books, just in order to make them seem more valid and truthful.
And of course if you’re up on some tremendous plot, with heaven knows what, James Bond and a hat full of some terrible villains, if he can use a Ronson lighter, let’s say, or drive a Bentley motorcar, or stay in the Ritz Hotel, this all brings the reader back to earth.
Scott: You mentioned that you were a newspaperman.
Fleming: Yeah. Yes, I started off in Reuters, the international news agency, at the age of about 23, and served with them for about four years in London and Berlin and Moscow. I found I wasn’t earning enough money in journalism, as I expect you probably find also, and I went into The City to try and make some more. And I wasn’t very good in The City, and so I went back to The Times, actually, The London Times, and got them to send me off to Moscow in 1939, just before the War broke out, actually in January or February of 1939.
And then I served in Naval Intelligence as personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence throughout the War. Under two directors. And I had great fun and went round the world twice, and got involved in a lot of escapades, which were very exciting at the time. And after the War—
Scott: —What kind of escapades?
Fleming: Well, actually, part of the main plot of my first book, Casino Royale—the gambling sequence where Bond out-gambles a Russian agent and bankrupts him—stems from something that happened to me on the first time I went with my Director, Admiral Godfrey, to Washington in plainclothes before America came into the War. And we took the long route down, the flying boat, down by Lisbon and Africa and then across to South America and up that way. And on our first night in Lisbon, we talked to some of our Secret Service chaps there, and of course they were interested in hearing our views and we were interested in hearing theirs, because Lisbon was a great center of German espionage. And they said, well if you want to see these agents of the Abwehr, as they call them, you will find most of them gambling at the casino at Estoril.
And I suddenly had the brilliant idea that I would take on these Germans and strip them of their funds, thus making a small dent in the secret treasury of the Abwehr. So I sat down at the table, and banco’d one of the Germans once, and lost, and I banco’d him again, and lost again, banco’d him for the third time and I was cleaned out. So that wasn’t a very successful exploit. But it was on the basis of this real-life episode that I based the big gambling scene in Casino Royale.
Scott: And Bond actually repeated that and was only saved by the American agent giving him money.
Fleming: Yes, that’s right [laughs], quite right. Absolutely right.
[Continued in the next post]
[Continued from previous post]
Scott: When you react to a place like, say, Paris—or when Bond reacts to Paris—do I take it that is actually the way you felt about Paris?
Fleming: Ah yes it is. I gave Paris a bit of a pasting, I remember, in one of my short stories, and complained that it hadn't been the same thing since the war, since the occupation. And all these observations are really of course observations of my own, which I put into Bond’s mouth or mind.
Scott: In one or two of your books, you have some brief descriptions of Canadian scenes. Now I find that these tend to be much less colorful than your descriptions of other areas of the world. I’m wondering if this is because you have found Canada a colorless place?
Fleming: No, the main reason is I’ve been very little in Canada. I was there during the war two or three times on rather hasty missions, Naval Intelligence work. But I simply haven’t had the chance to visit Canada, and visit the romantic parts of Canada. I could imagine that Toronto would make a tremendous locale for a gangster story for instance, these days, from what I read in the newspapers.
Scott: Oh, you’ve got the impression we have gangsters in Toronto, do you?
Fleming: Well, that’s simply what I read in the English newspapers. I’m merely giving that as an example of a town that undoubtedly, if I wished to set a gangster story in Toronto, it would be a suitable locale to use.
Scott: In the books, you describe little foibles of Bond’s, things he likes or dislikes. Usually things he dislikes, things like tea and Windsor knots. Are these your dislikes?
Fleming: Yes, they are. Yeah.
Scott: Are you given to many, and strong dislikes?
Fleming: I think so. They are sort of foibles, you know, but tea I regard as practically the downfall of the British Empire, and a tie with a Windsor knot I find much too tidy. I think, you know, it shows that a man is rather vain, I think, if he uses a Windsor knot in his tie. So I put these in as they sort of build up, perhaps, the character of James Bond to a certain extent, and I’m rather amused of course to put forward my own little quirks in prose.
Scott: How did the Empire founder on tea?
Fleming: Well, I think that people are always drinking the damned stuff. I remember during the war, you know, sort of four o’clock came in the middle of some tremendous naval action and then these bloody tea trolleys used to come rumbling down the corridor of the Admiralty, and somehow everybody used to stop work. That’s an exaggeration.
Scott: Mr Fleming, how does an author tackle the problem of selecting a name for the hero of his stories?
Fleming: Well, it isn’t rather the hero. I simply pick up names just driving through the countryside, through villages and so on. You see an interesting name over a tobacconists or chemists, or something of that sort, in any country in the world. But when I started to write these books in 1952, I wanted to find a name which wouldn’t have any of the sort of romantic overtones, like Peregrine Carruthers or who it might be, I wanted a really flat, quiet name. And one of my bibles out here is James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, which is a very famous ornithological book, indeed. And I thought, well "James Bond," now that’s a pretty, quiet name. And so I simply stole it and used it.
Scott: Mr. Fleming, I appreciate that in any book, and particularly in a thriller, you need a villain. You have a collective villain in most of yours, or in a lot of yours, the Russians. Do you really feel they are as bad as you paint them?
Fleming: Well the trouble is, as any thriller writer will tell you, the villain is a very difficult man to find anywhere. Because if one is a fairly intelligent person, one knows that a villain really probably has a psychopathic background, and if you paint in a psychopathic background you will immediately make the reader rather sorry for him, make him a sick man, which of course most villains are.
And the Russians have behaved in a very villainous way since the war, in many respects. I mean it was only last year there was a case brought against a Russian agent in Karlsruhe who confessed to having killed three West Germans with a cyanide water pistol. That’s a water pistol full of cyanide, pure cyanide, which leaves no trace. He generally shot the man going up a staircase and with this spray—and the man fell down instantly dead. And after a very short while the cyanide fumes disappeared, and probably the autopsy said that he died of a heart attack climbing the stairs.
And this man had been sent to kill a third man, or fourth man, I can’t remember quite which, and his nerve broke, as it often does with killers, and he confessed. And he got seven or eight years and so on and so forth because of his confession. Now that’s a very villainous act! And so if the Russians go on with this sort of joke, you know, I shall have to pursue them.
But before the War of course, the Germans were always set as the villains in our thrillers. And I think nearly all Bulldog Drummond’s villains were Germans. But I rather liked the Russians; I worked there twice, and they are a very great people and I don’t want to rag them too much. And maybe before long I shall have pushed off towards China, but they’re a very great people too, and so I’m rather hard put to it. It’s a very difficult thing to get these villains to grow on trees.
Scott: Why do you say before long you may be pushed off towards China?
Fleming: Well, simply because I think there’s a tremendous relaxation in Russia, and that the West and Russia, perhaps even this year, may get very much closer together. That’s my feeling, just my nose. And if that is going to happen, if peace is going to break out, well the last thing I want to do is to provide any hindrance to the process.
Scott: When you say closer together, do you mean just closer together just at the conference table, or do you think that there is a changing of political ideas and ideals?
Fleming: Oh, I think there’s a tremendous melting of the ice floe in Russia itself. And I think they’re moving towards something like the brand of extreme Socialism that we have in the extreme left wing in England and elsewhere in Europe. And I think before long that it will all end up with more or less the same brand of Socialism. That may be wishful thinking, but that’s how I see the general pattern of history probably working out. Because certainly Communism is breaking down in its machinery very badly, as we all know from the bad crop situation this year in Russia. And of course, it may be a very long process, but I can’t help feeling that probably that is the way of history.
I personally don’t believe there'll ever be an atomic war, because I think war’s gone out of fashion. This whole business of killing millions and millions of people, either with one weapon or another, I think has become old fashioned, and may cease to be a form of human activity altogether, if everybody can become civilized at the same rate.
But of course, that is not possible, and we have a lot of dangers that some lunatic like Castro, or perhaps one of the new African states, may suddenly get hold of nuclear weapons and start pressing the world, and, you know, playing around with these things. And so what we’ve really got to do is to try and ensure that the climate of history moves equally all over the world. Let’s hope that the Chinese, for instance, will shortly be caught by—infected by—the general atmosphere which I see. I don’t know whether I’m right or not.
Scott: You approve, I presume, of the French trend now to recognize Red China?
Fleming: Oh yes, I think it’s ridiculous. Here is one of the greatest nations in the whole history of the world, with what, 500 million people, and you can’t just wipe it off the map. I think, with any luck, in a year or two China will be a full-blooded member of the United Nations, and completely accepted as a member of the comity of nations. It’s ridiculous of course that this huge vacuum should exist on the map, really. They’re wonderful people; they may be politically misguided in our view but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very fine people.
Scott: A moment ago you referred to Castro as a madman. With Cuba only 90 miles away from you here, is James Bond not afraid of revolution being exported to Jamaica?
Fleming: Well, they’re trying, in a way. They’re putting over a great deal of revolutionary propaganda on the radio, as they are to all the Caribbean states and Central American states. But the Jamaican, if he hears politics being talked on the radio, he’s likely to turn it off and get on to music, you know. He doesn’t really want anybody’s politics.
Scott: In one of your books, you refer to a cab driver “born into the buyer’s market of the Welfare State in the age of the atomic bomb and space flight. For him, life was meaningless.” This is a pretty gloomy view of the Welfare State, etc.
Fleming: Well, I think it’s an exaggeration. I described the young man as a bit of a Beatnik and I was trying to say, which I personally believe, that while the Welfare State has brought us a lot of very worthwhile dividends, particularly in the shape of medicine and so forth, and the basic necessities of life, it has featherbedded the ordinary man in the street, to my mind to too great an extent. I think this is recognized by politicians everywhere, but of course once you start on welfare statism, it’s very difficult to slow down the process.
And when you get a chicken in every pot then the next government has to offer a chicken and a half in every pot, and so on and so forth, and so it goes on. And I think it’s rather inclined to make everybody spectators rather than competent, let’s say, in sport and so on and so forth. They don’t take part in much; they just go and spectate. And of course with television and so on nowadays—with all due respect to you—people would rather sit at home and not get out in the fresh air.
But I think nowadays, a lot of people are rather inclined to sort of wander around and get bored, and boredom is the worst sin, of course, for the human being. Really, it’s the worst thing that can happen to them, boredom.
Scott: Does this then, to take us around to a reason for James Bond being so popular, in that he always has a goal?
Fleming: I think it probably does, in a way. He starts with a straightforward one and he goes for it in a fairly straightforward fashion. And I think people like the action.
Scott: Is it possible that one of these days we will read a James Bond novel in which the hero is killed at the end?
Fleming: I couldn’t possibly afford it.
Excellent 😁 thank you
Thank you Revelator and Caractacus for this brilliant transcript. Some very interesting political viewpoints that I won’t go into as that sort of thing is banned on here.
thats excellent @Revelator , I was worried you forgotten that one
I remember it took me most of two weeks to transcribe it completely, one hour a night after supper. Flemings a mumbler and some of the most important bits I had to listen to ten times or more before being confident what he was trying to say
when I first posted my version in another thread, @Barbel suggested Fleming was in the middle of writing Man with the Golden Gun, and was inspired to write the scene where Scaramanga shoots the kling-klings because the bird had interrupted his interview!
I dont think I've reread this since the new film came out: the interview ends with Fleming being asked if he'd ever end a book the same way the movie ended!
Revelator I like the idea of a "best of" interview quotes: Flemings got his stock answers and anecdotes he seems to repeat every interview, so itd be good to highlight the more unique information he may only have given once or twice
Coolhand: I don't think there would be a problem in discussing Fleming's politics, so long as we did so in a neutral manner.
Caractacus: I am an elephant, I never forget! Actually I was hoping one or two more interviews might turn up before I used the CBC one as a finale, but that didn't happen. I annually transcribe recordings of board meetings to produce Minutes, so I can sympathize with your travail.
Barbel's theory is a good one, though I'd like to think Fleming was too much a bird lover for the influence to be anything other than subconscious.
I was also struck by the ending. Fleming liked to frequently complain about two things--being out of inspiration and needing to get rid of Bond--but I don't think he was serious about either. The original typescript of FRWL ended with Bond in perfect health and Klebb defeated, so it's arguable that the cliffhanger ending was put in to raise readers' interest in Bond's return. And in his letters to concerned readers Fleming always reassured them Bond had survived. Furthermore, if Fleming really wanted to get away from Bond, he would have invented other heroes instead of persistently returning to 007.
Fleming indeed liked to repeat the same stock answers and anecdotes, especially since interviewers tended to ask the same general questions. A pity he didn't live long enough to be interviewed by one of us!
Oh, that can be arranged ...
AJB: Thank you for consenting to be interviewed by us, Mr Fleming - oh, we should say Sir Ian now, shouldn't we?
Fleming: Yes, it was nice of the King to hand me a title. I suppose his mother had disapproved of my books.
AJB: All 74 of them.
Fleming: Is that right? I stopped counting some time ago.
AJB: It’s remarkable that you're still with us at 116, considering you're drinking a half bottle of spirits daily, not to mention smoking 70 cigarettes and making love, with rather cold passion, to one of three similarly disposed married women
Fleming: Oh, I'm still fit. I was tap dancing with Dick Van Dyke just the other day.
I am enough of a fan to convince myself that every word is true!
Barbel knows the location of the Valley of the Blue Moon, Fleming went there to escape McClory, Elvis is there (not in a chip shop) etc. etc. he’s met them all 😁
Thank you, guys, and an expanded version of that interview has inevitably turned up at Imaginary Conversations - Page 131 — ajb007