32 replies to this topic

[Revelator]

This thread is dedicated to listing media sightings of Ian Fleming that are too short to merit threads of their own. I'll lead off with the following bit, and if you have media sightings or mentions of similar length feel free to post them here.

Our first sighting comes from Bookforum, in an article called "PUB DATES 2010: A YEAR OF READING." The editors write "Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading...Instead, we've asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year." One of the authors, Tom McCarthy includes Fleming in his list:

The Blofeld Trilogy (1961–64) by Ian Fleming. It's total trash, but I can't stop reading it. And sometimes he comes up with a line like this: "The operator played the dials with insect fingers, pausing, verifying, hastening on through the sound waves of the world." That's worthy of, well, me. The new Penguin Modern Classics edition has a good intro by Nicholas Lezard.

If Fleming is worthy of McCarthy, does that mean McCarthy is trash?

[Revelator]

Another sighting, though from a few years back, taken a Travel Intelligence article called "The Friendly Isles: in the Footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor," by Robin Hanbury-Tenison. It can be read here.
The Fleming bits are excerpted below:

And so, at last, to Goldeneye, the ultimate bolthole, where all the Bond books were written. Leigh Fermor’s description of the house, as so much of his writing, stands the test of time: “Here, on a headland, Commander Ian Fleming has built a house called Goldeneye that might serve as a model for new houses in the tropics. Trees surround it on all sides except that of the sea which it almost overhangs. Great windows capture every breeze, to cool, even on the hottest day, the large white rooms. The windows that look towards the sea are glassless, but equipped with outside shutters against the rain: enormous quadrilaterals surrounded by dark wooden frames which enclose a prospect of sea and cloud and sky, and tame the elements, as it were, into an ever-changing fresco of which one can never tire.”

In 1956, Sir Anthony Eden, as Prime Minister, spent three weeks recuperating there after the Suez crisis. In 1976, some 12 years after Fleming’s death, my old friend Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, persuaded Bob Marley to buy it. But he found it “too posh” and so Blackwell changed the name on the sale document and bought it himself. Now he has made it into the most comfortable and romantic place to stay in the whole of the Caribbean, with its private beach, swimming pool and even a cinema.

When I lunched with Ian Fleming in 1959, on my first honeymoon, with Marika, he told me that every day he swam out to the reef off Goldeneye and gave two octopuses a live conch each. The next day he would collect the empty shells, like a milkman, since they alone of all creatures were capable of cleaning them properly. He said this had given him the idea for the title of a future Bond book, Octopussy, but he hadn’t worked out the story.

We swam out to the reef with Ramsay, who had worked for Fleming. He said he knew where the octopuses were, but we couldn’t find them. “They must have gone,” he said, “no one feed them no more.”

How does everything about a place change in 50 years, and yet the place itself remain the same? It is because of that unique mixture of cultures that is the Caribbean – and no one has captured and evoked the extraordinary differences between the islands better than Paddy Leigh Fermor did in his first book, The Traveller’s Tree. As Paddy says: “Each island is a distinct and idiosyncratic entity, a civilisation, or the reverse, fortuitous in its origins and empirical in its development.” And then again, quoting an old Jamaican: “We’re always going somewhere. But we never get there.”

[Revelator]

From a GQ interview with Adam Reed, creator of the spy spoof Archer, which airs on the FX network:

Reed: But years and years ago, a friend gave me a collection of all the James Bond novels, original first-edition paperbacks, with these lurid pulp covers on them. And I started reading those, and I had never read them before, and it was like, page one—this guy is a dick! He's a troubled man, and he's incredibly misogynistic. There's one scene—-I forget which book it's from, but basically what happens is rape. It's like, "She protested, but then Bond twisted her hand behind her back and took his reward." Like, what the ?!
So that got the wheels turning. I was like, "How can I make a spy character the tiest dude in the world—-that you still really sympathize with and root for?" That's been sort of the driving thing.

GQ: So you're doing the Ian Fleming version of Bond, who was a nastier guy than the movie version...

REED: Yeah, but amp that up, so it's like, even Bond would be repulsed by this guy.

GQ: The books are a totally different experience. There's one where it starts with him lighting "the first of his sixty cigarettes of the day." Which is awesome.

REED: And Bond drank way too much. There's the whole vodka versus gin martini thing, bu—I think this is in Dr. No—-his martini was gin and vodka, and Lillet Blonde. It's like, just get a Long Island iced tea, buddy!

GQ: I feel like a lot of guys go through that thing where they decide to order James Bond's drink, and then they have two of them, and basically have to be hospitalized.

REED: I have to go home now.

GQ: "This is a giant glass of alcohol, with nothing else in it."

REED: And all he's had to eat that day is sixty cigarettes.

Edited by Revelator, 24 February 2011 - 09:47 PM.

[Jump James]

This thread is dedicated to listing media sightings of Ian Fleming that are too short to merit threads of their own. I'll lead off with the following bit, and if you have media sightings or mentions of similar length feel free to post them here.

Our first sighting comes from Bookforum, in an article called "PUB DATES 2010: A YEAR OF READING." The editors write "Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading...Instead, we've asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year." One of the authors, Tom McCarthy includes Fleming in his list:

The Blofeld Trilogy (1961–64) by Ian Fleming. It's total trash, but I can't stop reading it. And sometimes he comes up with a line like this: "The operator played the dials with insect fingers, pausing, verifying, hastening on through the sound waves of the world." That's worthy of, well, me. The new Penguin Modern Classics edition has a good intro by Nicholas Lezard.

If Fleming is worthy of McCarthy, does that mean McCarthy is trash?

Total trash? How very dare he!

[Revelator]

This is more of a net sighting, than a media one. A screenwriter named Todd Alcott did a blog series where he reviewed all of the Bond films (with varying degrees of insight). In one post he asked "how Bond spends his time when he’s not blowing up and saving the world." One quite insightful response (especially notable since many other comments were fatuous) came from Jackson Publick, one of the co-creators of the comedic animated series The Venture Brothers, which counts Bond as one of its major influences. Mr. Publick, who has obviously read the books in depth, noted the following:

Actually, in the books, he’s pretty freaking bored when he’s not on a mission. He gets stuck doing a lot of office work and kind of spaces out, like pretty much everyone else. They even imply that the majority of his time is spent in this state (as Indiana Jones does in his lecture to his archeology class in Raiders of the Lost Ark and his “X never marks the spot” speech in The Last Crusade), and that, when he’s not on the Company expense account, he sticks to bland, simple foods like cold roast beef sandwiches. He does a lot of compartmentalizing of his life, seems to have a strong (if highly subjective) moral code which doesn’t always jive with the code his superiors would have him live by, and is a kind of control freak loner. Presumably he’s a little conflicted about some of the horrible things he has to do and seeks to squeak out a little bit of pleasure from ultimately small, controllable things: sex without messy attachments, an old Bentley, good food, good wine. He bums out a bit over the relatively meager pay his government job provides him and so lives as high as he can when they send him to Monte Carlo or wherever, where, being a smart, controlled guy with a system, he can sometimes parlay his meager earnings into a nice little nest egg because he knows this ride isn’t going to last long. Definitely a touch of the existentialist in him, with the moral/professional code of your old time detective heroes.

Edited by Revelator, 23 March 2011 - 10:59 PM.

[Revelator]

This sighting is from an essay by the excellent Clive James, called "Starting with Sludge":

Personally doing a lot for the royalties of Leslie Charteris, I bought every Saint book in print, usually in the big yellow Hodder and Stoughton trade paperbacks, although the Pan pocketbooks were more desirable, having the better cover paintings. (On the Pan covers, Simon Templar posed in black tie and pistol plus adoring soignée women: surely the prototype for James Bond’s graphic image in later years.) ...Even more than Bulldog Drummond, the Saint was a model for James Bond: years later, I could tell from the first pages of Ian Fleming that he, too, had once thrilled to Simon Templar’s savoir faire, his Lobb shoes, his upmarket mistress and his mighty, hurtling Hirondel-—a car that would have seen off Bond’s Bentley in nothing flat. Unlike Drummond, the Saint, though he packed a narcotic uppercut and could shoot the pips out of the six of diamonds after flicking it through the air, existed on the level of mentality: he was clever, he had wit.

Our much-missed quondam board member Spynovelfan would be amused at how James came to the same conclusion he often propounded on this forum.

[Revelator]

An unpleasant mention of Fleming from some a**hole writing in The Atlantic. He's a LeCarre fan of course...
The article, titled "The Anti-James Bond" is about Le Carre's George Smiley. Several particularly noxious quotes follow:

That violent nullity James Bond having long outlived his creator, it has fallen to an interesting gang of alpha novelists and superhacks to keep him busy: since the death of Ian Fleming in 1964, more than 20 new Bond books have been written. The latest of them, Jeffery Deaver’s Carte Blanche, was published this year, and as recently as 2008, Bond nuts were solemnly delighted—or I was, anyway—by Sebastian Faulks’s even-better-than-the-real-thing novel, Devil May Care, which featured a partially lobotomized lead goon and a villain with a main de singe, or “monkey hand” (hairy wrist, non-opposable thumb).

Perhaps the most rewarding of the pseudo-Flemings, however, has been Kingsley Amis, whose Colonel Sun appeared in 1968 under the nom de plume Robert Markham. Amis’s Bond, while retaining the familiar psychopath’s obsession with menus, tailoring, and branded goods—“Bond almost felt relaxed, finding the charcoal-grilled lamb cutlets with bitter local spinach very acceptable”—is also a suspiciously Kingsley-esque conservative, deploring newly built houses and the rise of a “vast undifferentiated culture, one complex of super-highways, hot-dog stands and neon … stretching from Los Angeles to Jerusalem.” Amis would maintain a fierce moral allegiance to 007. Decades later, upon learning that John le Carré had described Bond as an “ideal defector” and “the ultimate prostitute,” he vented in a letter to Philip Larkin: le Carré’s comment was a “piece of bubbling dog,” he wrote, adding that he preferred Bond to the “dull ers” of le Carré’s own fiction.

George Smiley, le Carré’s enduring gift to the literature of espionage, is, of course, the anti-Bond. Across the sequence of novels in which he appears, peripherally or centrally, this secret servant of Her Majesty (like Bond, he works for British Intelligence, known in le Carré world as “the Circus”) is discreet to the point of self-erasure. Bureaucratically dowdy, rarely spotted in the field, a dull by both instinct and training, Smiley drops no one-liners, romances no tarot-card readers, roars no speedboats through the Bayou. Bond has his ultraviolence and his irresistibility, his famous “comma of black hair”...Smiley is also a cuckold of near-mythic proportions: his wife, the glamorous and rarely-at-home Lady Ann, seems to sleep with everybody but him. (She has doubtless slept at least once with James Bond: he’s just her type.) When John le Carré dies, there will be no pseudo–le Carrés, rotating the clichés of Smileydom through their potboilers. Not only is le Carré more or less inimitable—-less imitable, certainly, than Ian Fleming, whose style was essentially that of a school bully with a typewriter—-but Smiley himself is too elusive a creature to be captured by any pen other than that of his creator....

It’s very 2011, I suppose, to rub away the interpersonal texture and crank up the anomie. Didn’t the Bond franchise give it a go in 2006’s Casino Royale? Daniel Craig as a harder, icier Bond, hacking his ethically unencumbered way across a borderless post-9/11 globe... To strip down or minimalize le Carré, however, is to sacrifice the almost Tolkienesque grain and depth of his created world: the decades-long backstory, the lingo, the arcana, the liturgical repetitions of names and functions. Did you know that it was John le Carré who introduced the word mole (for “double agent”) into English? Also honey trap? He has enriched the language itself—-a claim not even the most devoted Bondian, not Kingsley Amis himself, could make for Ian Fleming.

Edited by Revelator, 08 November 2011 - 06:10 PM.

[Dustin]

I wonder how serious the guy actually is? Really, this reads more like the third double-bourbon on top of half a bottle of champagne to me.

But he evidently does have a point, however blunted by drink or disillusion. Sequels/prequels/midquels of the Smiley canon are hardly a realistic possibility.

[Revelator]

True, but sequels/prequels/midquels of the Fleming canon have never really worked, except to those snobs who assumed that Devil May Care had to be a better Bond novel because Faulks was writing it. Sherlock Holmes has been the subject of a million sequels/prequels/midquels, yet Parker presumably wouldn't knock him for that. I think Parker's serious in his literary snobbery, and his attitude is sadly still widespread.
Smiley wouldn't be suited for continuations precisely because he's so conventional and, as Amis noted, such a dull ****er. An author can easily create such a character on his own, without having to borrow him.

There's a comments section below Parker's screed, and I hope to post there within the next day or so.

Edited by Revelator, 08 November 2011 - 09:19 PM.

[Binyamin]

Not a "Fleming Sighting" per se -- But I recently finished both "Corsair" by Clive Cussler and "Red Rabbit" by Tom Clancy. They are different genres, one an improbable adventure romp and the other a realistic political intrigue. Yet -- James Bond was mentioned by characters in both books.

This jumped out at me, since I read them back-to-back: James Bond is so pervasive a character that he ends up even in COMPETING espionage novels. That's significant.

[glidrose]

An unpleasant mention of Fleming from some a**hole writing in The Atlantic. He's a LeCarre fan of course...

I think Parker's serious in his literary snobbery,

James Parker. His bio and picture. He's a Stephen King fan too. He reviews Under the Dome.

Edited by glidrose, 08 November 2011 - 09:22 PM.

[Revelator]

James Parker. His bio and picture. He's a Stephen King fan too....

Selective snobbery reflects even more badly on him. Bashing Fleming with the LeCarre stick, and assuming that Faulks's Bond book had to be better than Fleming's Bond books, are both acts of literary snobbery. That the perpetrator happens to like Stephen King and Tolkien is not that surprising--both authors have grown quite respectable in the past couple of decades, whereas Fleming still lags behind, especially in the middlebrow realm where LeCarre is king.

[Major Tallon]

This little bit of cant consists primarily of invective dressed up in snooty verbiage, attempting to pass for analysis. From the outset, he tells us that Bond is "a violent nullity" (a label I dispute), a "partially lobotomized lead goon" (is this what passes for literary criticism these days?), a "familiar psychopath" (presumably for being particular about his meals, clothes, and accessories; hadn't realized that this makes one a psychopath), and a person who is "ethically unencumbered" (referring to Craig's Bond rather than Fleming's and being wrong on either score). He also confuses movie Bond with literary Bond in his references to "roaring speedboats . . . through the Bayou." Smiley, on the other hand, is "an enduring gift to the literature of espionage," whose exploits have "enriched the language itself." (So he hasn't read The Looking Glass War, then.) And oh yes, we Bond fans are "Bond nuts."

As literary criticism, this just won't do. It rests on erroneous generalizations about Bond, exaggerated well past the point of caricature, and frequently degenerates into name-calling, while lauding le Carre beyond reason. This thing could be analyzed at length, but it's really not worth the effort.

[Dustin]

It's perhaps only a minor detail given the kind of pseudo snobbery that's on display in that piece, but I'm curious: how much Fleming - if any - did Parker really read? To come up with the verdicts he did? DMC 'better than the real thing'? Frankly, if that's his honest opinion, well, then he doesn't deserve any better and is probably quite happy with reputation-heavy names instead of actual content.

[Jim]

"partially lobotomized lead goon" (is this what passes for literary criticism these days?)

Magic.

[glidrose]

Decades later, upon learning that John le Carré had described Bond as an “ideal defector” and “the ultimate prostitute,” he vented in a letter to Philip Larkin: le Carré’s comment was a “piece of bubbling dog,” he wrote

John le Carre considered defecting to the Soviet Union.

Did you know that it was John le Carré who introduced the word mole (for “double agent”) into English?

The term "mole" first appeared in The History of the Reign of King Henry VII by Sir Francis Bacon in 1626.

[Napoleon Solo]

Short feature from HMSS in 1997 about Ian Fleming's papers at Indiana University:

http://www.hmss.com/...es/lillylib.htm

[Revelator]

Here are two items.

 

The first is amusingly mistaken. The Huffington Post has an article on "Four Books Ideal For Summer." One of the selections is Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, which "was much-loved and admired by Ian Fleming." Not so! Fleming reviewed the book for The Spectator and complained that the pacing was slow,  the villains were feeble, and that the book belonged more in a mariners' library than with spy thrillers.

 

And now for our second item, found in the Nov. 8, 2011 edition of The Telegraph. The article, by literary critic Alan Massie, is titled "Why James Bond will go on and on." Some excerpts:

 

I came to Bond early, in my teens, which was probably the right age. My attention was drawn to him by a review of either his first or second novel in The Sunday Times. It was written by Raymond Chandler and that was recommendation enough. I’ve wondered since how sincere Chandler’s admiration was. He had praised Dashiell Hammett for giving murder back to the sort of people who commit it, and must surely have seen the strong element of sheer fantasy in Bond: 007, licensed to kill and all that. (But then Chandler admitted to a similar “element of burlesque” in his own writing.) It’s probable however that he over-egged the pudding. Fleming admired him; so he returned the admiration like the well brought-up public schoolboy (Dulwich College) that he always, in one part of himself, remained. Moreover, Fleming was on the staff of The Sunday Times and may well have solicited the review.

Be that as it may, the early Bond books were very good, the first four or five anyway, before inspiration flagged and self-parody took over. Fleming was a very good journalist and, as is not unusual with writers of his sort of books, the first half of the novel was usually better than the second, when the action took over and span out of control into absurdity. What one remembers are the splendid set pieces – the game of baccarat in Casino Royale, and, best of all, the bridge game in Moonraker. The villains were better in the early books too; it was sad when Cold War détente persuaded him to ditch SMERSH for the wildly improbable SPECTRE and the grotesque Blofeld. I suppose the best of them is From Russia With Love, despite the creaking mechanism necessary to get the book going. It has by far the best villains, Red Grant and Rosa Klebb, best because almost wholly credible.

Fleming wrote well in a plain and lucid style, influenced, I should say, by Somerset Maugham. He had a gift for the memorable line. The description of the Chegroes (Chinese Negroes) as “a tough forgotten race", and my own favourite, a throwaway judgement worthy of Buchan, “The Turks of the hills are all right, the Turks of the plains are no good.”

The later books are weak, and I think he had had enough of Bond by the time he died, aged only 56, but he had given a lot of people, including me, a lot of pleasure, and he had done something that is rare: creating a figure like Tarzan or Sherlock Holmes, capable of escaping from fiction into a sort of modern myth. And so the films roll on and there seems no reason why they shouldn’t have a longer life than Fleming’s own. Indeed they have almost done so already.

 

 

The Chandler review Massie remembers is probably of Diamonds Are Forever. As for Chandler's sincerity--the biographies of him and Fleming make clear that the two had a genuine Bond, though Chandler privately told Fleming that his books had "disimproved" since Casino Royale and that he'd gone easy on DAF.

I agree with Massie that FRWL is probably Fleming's best novel, but I think the later books are better--especially the Blofeld trilogy that Massie abhors. He places too much of a premium on probability and so forth.

Being half-Turkish, I've long been puzzled about Fleming's preference for highland Turks. The best explanation I can give is that Turks of the hills tended to be nomadic tribesmen--unlike their softer, sedentary countrymen on the plain--and thus more conformable to the tough romantic bandit stereotype that Fleming used for characters like Draco and Darko Kerim.

Edited by Revelator, 01 June 2013 - 03:59 AM.

[Revelator]

This week the New York Review of Books reprinted an excerpt from Gore Vidal's famous essay “The Ashes of Hollywood,” a review of the books on the New York Times fiction best-seller list of January 7, 1973. Vidal complains that many of the bestsellers are influenced by bad old movies, and that...

 

Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler–Hitchcock style with some sadomasochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books.

 

I'm not sure that Vidal is right in this case. Fleming doesn't seem to have been a great moviegoer, and his books are influenced more by Ambler's books than by the films made from them.

[Dustin]

Most entertaining reading; strange I didn't come across this before. Thanks for sharing here.

 

As for Fleming, he must have had a soft spot for cinema, otherwise I doubt he would have pursued the dream to see his creation on the big screen with such stamina. He was probably more enamoured with the silver screen - and the dark theatres in front of that screen - in his younger years.

[Major Tallon]

I rather think that Fleming's interest in cinema consisted primarily of thinking how much money he could make from selling the rights to the Bond books.  So far as I know, Bond's only venture into the world of film consisted of his having seen Charles Laughton in "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (Goldfinger, chapter 2).  Since it was released in 1933, it must have made quite an impression on the young lad.  Perhaps it so soured him on cinemagoing that he never went again.

[Dustin]

I rather think that Fleming's interest in cinema consisted primarily of thinking how much money he could make from selling the rights to the Bond books. 

 

Good point, probably true. Fleming indeed seems to have been constantly concerned about making money, much more than one would suspect from his background. But the young Fleming also had a certain resemblance with Stewart Granger, which Fleming probably was aware of, or made aware of. Either way Fleming most likely had seen the few films everybody else did, perhaps with an emphasis on Hitchcock and other directors/producers he wanted to convince of his projects. But I too don't see Fleming as cineaste.

[Revelator]

The cinematic references in the Bond books to suggest that Fleming was a casual moviegoer--Milton Crest has Humphrey Bogart's voice, Tatiana is compared with a young Garbo, North by Northwest is mentioned in TB (though in his letters Fleming said it had too much humor and favored The Wages of Fear as a better model for the Bond films), and Bond recalls childhood memories of Douglas Fairbanks in YOLT. But on the larger scale, I don't see enough influence from specific films to back up Vidal's claim. And unlike the much-missed Spynovelfan, Vidal wasn't expert on the traditions and history of the spy novel. Thus he likely mistook the influence of other thriller writers for that of the movies.

[Revelator]

A very minor sighting, from Antonia Quirke's New Statesman review of a biography of Oliver Reed. (Incidentally, the book was written by Robert Sellers, The Battle For Bond, that sloppily-written pro-Whittingham tome on the Thunderball case). Back to Quirke's review:

 

Three things Sellers mentions jump out – three parts that Reed either turned down or was for some reason denied that would have changed everything. First, Quint in Jaws. Clearly Steven Spielberg – always brilliant at casting –was looking for a genuine loose cannon. Second, as Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. Instead, history must settle for Jon Finch(and Keith Chegwin as Fleance).
And last, Bond. Think about this. While Sean Connery plays 007 as a chancer secretly impressed by his business account and caviar, the young Reed had the class and cruelty of Ian Fleming’s Bond and even the facial scars mentioned in the novels (Reed had been glassed in a pub, the shards shredding right through to his tongue). If Bond is a dream of social mobility, Reed had it all – but it was not to be. Too ruinous was his reputation for getting his c**k out mid-shot, waving dildos at Keith Moon or eating light bulbs.

[Revelator]

I've been going through the online archive of The Spectator and have unearthed a few mentions of our favorite author.

 

The first is from a review by Colin Wilson (published July 23, 1971) of Colin Watson's Snobbery with Violence:

 

J. B. Priestley once advised Chandler to seize his courage and try a serious novel, and Mr Watson raises the question of whether Ian Fleming might have written something less schoolboyishly preposterous. This misses the point — that the casual vehicle of the thriller allowed Chandler and Fleming to say everything they had to say. To ask them to be serious is like asking Kipling or Vachel Lindsay to write Tennysonian poetry.

Ultimately, I suspect, the thriller must be judged as a kind of poetry. (Perhaps that is why Yeats was so fond of them.) I have always felt that Greene's entertainments are greatly superior to his serious novels. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," says a character in Private Lives. Precisely; because it has its own authentic poetry. Sherlock Holmes had it; Chandler had it; the film of The Third Man had it; Ian Fleming had it. Mr Watson takes a few side-sweeps at Amis's defence of James Bond; he mentions Amis's attempt to counter the sadism charge by quoting "the real thing " in Mickey Spillane. "This is rather like retorting to a diner who complains of having found slugs on his cabbage that he is lucky not to have gone to the establishment next door, where slugs are served as the main course." A good point, but as irrelevant as Amis's defence. The business of all creative writers is to create 'alternative worlds' ; like Omar Khayyam, they want to shatter the world to pieces and rebuild it nearer to the heart's desire. Fleming's ' alternative vision' was of golden beaches, luxury hotels, sophisticated and athletic girls, and enough danger in the air to keep everybody wide awake. It would never have stood up to 'serious development,' but as a kind of crude poetry it was oddly authentic, and Fleming himself had a touch of sadism. If he hadn't put it in, the novels would have been less than genuine self expression.

 

 

 

The next mention is from the Nov. 17, 1973 edition of the "Crime Compendium" column:

 

The sadism tag which has for so long been attached to James Bond is, of course, woefully inaccurate: it would be much more correct to describe Ian Fleming's hero as a masochist, and in that he is very much in the tradition of the tough guy heroes. But Fleming was also a great admirer of Raymond Chandler, and Bond managed to pick up some of the characteristics of the distinctively American tough-guy private eye hero, who is still going strong indeed, and one of whose outstanding abilities is to take an enormous amount of physical punishment and come back slugging.

 

 

 

We skip ahead to Aug. 17, 2002. The next extract is from Raymond Carr's review of In Churchill's Shadow, by David Cannadine:

 

In the 1880s the patriotism of the operas was aggressively self-confident. Foreigners were comic figures denied the benefits of British freedom. Cannadine presents Ian Fleming's Bond as a latter-day Victorian patriot, like John Buchan's stiff-upper-lip heroes for whom materialism would sap the nerve of the master race. But Bond was addicted to the more expensive products of the consumer society; his women are bedded in luxury hotels. Gambling and fornication he defended as legitimate basic instincts. What would Buchan's heroes have made of this description of the members of the Blades Club?

"There might he cheats, or possible cheats, among them, men who beat their wives, men with perverse instincts, greedy men, cowardly men, lying men; but the elegance of the room invested each one with a kind of aristocracy."

Three generations from the jute mill, Fleming married an aristocrat who considered his novels vulgar. He despised the smart intellectuals of her salon in Victoria Square; Victoria Square was to be avoided, lest he meet the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon or Tony Crosland. In his later novels he does not hide his loathing of the Britain of the welfare state. But not all is lost. We could still climb Mount Everest; Fleming could even maintain that it was Britain rather than the United States that still carried the burden of defending the West. For Cannadine. Fleming's oeuvre is an escapist fantasy.

 

 

Our last excerpt dates from Dec. 17, 2005. It's from Candia McWilliam's review of several Bond-related books:
 

 

Here is part of an Evening Standard review of Goldfinger, written when it was first published in 1959 under the untentative title ‘The Richest Man in the World’: "The things that make Bond attractive: the sex, the sadism, the vulgarity of money for its own sake, the cult of power, the lack of standards."

Over 50 years later (Casino Royale, the first Bond book, was published in 1953, its author born in 1908) what is the verdict? That highly accessoried and fetishistic sex in the novels is rather unpenetrative by comparison with thriller-sex now; it is too ultra-romantic, of course, in the mean-keen/ luxe-location mode. The sadism is beating away in the heart of the novels, not to be minimised but nothing like as subcutaneous as what you might now find at the cinema in a film categorised PG. There is no question that the vulgarity of money for its own sake in the world without the fictionalised world of novels has quite outglared anything to be found within their pages. As for standards, Bond has them. He has them about everything, from the material world, where he is a famous fusspot about the details of his drinks, his scrambled eggs, his clothes, and women’s too, to the world of manners, which in the old days constituted the silken armour that manifested the real spirit of the man within — patriot, spy, loner, orphan.

"Innocence", wrote Ian Fleming in those notebooks of which Henry Chancellor makes splendid use in James Bond: The Man and his World (John Murray, £20) and that are germane to the imagined world he made in his novels, "is appealing but it isn’t interesting. It belongs to flowers and vegetables and tadpoles only. The guilty are interesting because they have lived in the world we know, which is a guilty place full of guilty people. The only interest of innocent people is that they are about to become guilty as they must with age."

I do not think that he believed this for a moment; I think that it is innocence for which he hankers. It perhaps takes a Scot to balance against innocence not corruption but guilt; this split goes through the man and his work and his unhappy life that has left us with such a stash, though, of reliably pleasurable reading.

Ian Fleming was born to quite new money, made by his prodigious working-class grandfather from Dundee. His father Valentine was killed in 1917, leaving four sons, of whom Ian was the second. A knotty will tied the forceful mother for life to her boys. She admired success and would tolerate nothing less. The oldest boy Peter was golden, captain of the Oppidans at Eton, very clever, and, it was to transpire, a natural and brilliant writer. Ian was not academically clever. Peter had scooped all the school’s great prizes. Ian became a most successful athlete, the victor ludorum, at a school where athletics has for some reason never been thought as prestigious as rackets or cricket. This seems to be so to this day.
The better Peter was, the badder Ian became. His deep habits of sadism and sternness with himself were laid down, painful (if sometimes ostensibly pleasantly so) for their possessor, but thrilling once transformed from neurosis into stories, for us, his readers.
Henry Chancellor has produced an amazingly rich volume that uses the life of Fleming to shed light upon his creature Bond with an intelligence unusual in even a serious biographer. The illustrations are a wonderful bonus. The whole may be referred to or, as I recommend, read from cover to cover at once, twice. It is a reflection upon a time and a class as well as upon the nature of secret worlds that have much in common, the worlds of the writer and the spy.

[Dustin]

Thanks for sharing, most intriguing. I'll come back to this later.

[Dustin]

Re: those sadism accusations I always thought Amis was pretty spot-on with his theory, most accusers simply misunderstand Bond, or sadism. Most probably they misunderstand both. Whether on purpose I wouldn't know...

 

It has - sadly, I hasten to add - become alarmingly popular in our present-day entertainment to depict acts of gross violence and the most despicable sadism and invite the audience to appreciate, approve and quite often get their kicks from such entertainment. Only, Bond's literary adventures practically never stoop to such complicity with the mob and its instincts. Yes, violence is used with gusto and effect, that is without a doubt the mark of the thriller. But the element of inviting the reader to feast - secretly or openly - on the violence is nearly entirely absent from the books. The violence's purpose is to horrify, not to arouse. Bond doesn't get his kicks from shooting Scaramanga or strangling Blofeld. I dare say neither did most of Fleming's readers. Those who look for such excitement will have found a different source of thrills in their day. I'm never sure if modern interpreters claiming to have found huge portions of sadistic catharsis in Fleming describe their actual findings or their lack of distance to the topic. There have of course always been individuals who read Fleming to support their private fantasies of a somewhat 'special' nature. But I'd still argue you can't really blame Fleming for the particular nature of his readers. The US Constitution and the Communist Manifest will have a similar number of sadists amongst their readers no doubt.

 

 

 

"Innocence", wrote Ian Fleming in those notebooks of which Henry Chancellor makes splendid use in James Bond: The Man and his World (John Murray, £20) and that are germane to the imagined world he made in his novels, "is appealing but it isn’t interesting. It belongs to flowers and vegetables and tadpoles only. The guilty are interesting because they have lived in the world we know, which is a guilty place full of guilty people. The only interest of innocent people is that they are about to become guilty as they must with age."

I do not think that he believed this for a moment; I think that it is innocence for which he hankers. It perhaps takes a Scot to balance against innocence not corruption but guilt; this split goes through the man and his work and his unhappy life that has left us with such a stash, though, of reliably pleasurable reading.

     

 

No, I think Fleming was spot-on with this. That was in fact his trick (and Chandler's before him, and Hammet's before Chandler, and Donald Hamilton's and John D. MacDonald's at roughly the same time): putting the knight in shining armour inside a contemporary suit or tee-shirt and let the saintly superhero have vices and doubts and very carnal cravings. And slay the odd dragon from time to time. There can be no doubt that Bond is a superhero. Only, he's not aware of it. He pretends he's an ordinary human being. And that's what makes him interesting because we - ordinary humans - can in turn pretend to be Bond-like. 

 

 

Ian Fleming was born to quite new money, made by his prodigious working-class grandfather from Dundee. His father Valentine was killed in 1917, leaving four sons, of whom Ian was the second. A knotty will tied the forceful mother for life to her boys. She admired success and would tolerate nothing less. The oldest boy Peter was golden, captain of the Oppidans at Eton, very clever, and, it was to transpire, a natural and brilliant writer. Ian was not academically clever. Peter had scooped all the school’s great prizes. Ian became a most successful athlete, the victor ludorum, at a school where athletics has for some reason never been thought as prestigious as rackets or cricket. This seems to be so to this day.
The better Peter was, the badder Ian became. His deep habits of sadism and sternness with himself were laid down, painful (if sometimes ostensibly pleasantly so) for their possessor, but thrilling once transformed from neurosis into stories, for us, his readers.
Henry Chancellor has produced an amazingly rich volume that uses the life of Fleming to shed light upon his creature Bond with an intelligence unusual in even a serious biographer. The illustrations are a wonderful bonus. The whole may be referred to or, as I recommend, read from cover to cover at once, twice. It is a reflection upon a time and a class as well as upon the nature of secret worlds that have much in common, the worlds of the writer and the spy.

 

This is one of the most common traps, the idea Fleming was upper-crust and elitist because of the class he came from. No, the class he came from was nouveau riche and few people were more despised than those. Perhaps the most vehemently by their own class, thus providing the fitting curse of the bourgeoisie, a constant ambition for more wealth and a pursuit of the missing - at least in their own perception - approval of their peers. The only ones worse off used to be nouveau riche having lost their riches or in some other way 'in a tight spot'. That made them just nouveau, not a state to aspire to.

 

And Fleming's situation was exactly that, always pushed to excel, by his mother, by his spectacularly successful brother, by his heroic father figure, by his own aspirations. The place Fleming thought was rightfully his - by his class, by his intelligence and abilities - was always taken long before he could even start to stand on his own feet. Pubertal rebellion against his father was impossible, against his mother not within his capabilities, neither emotionally nor materially. Fleming was dependent on his mother's goodwill, deferred to her time and again and was deeply miserable for it. Rightfully so. More than once he had failed showing basic character, backing down in exchange for a cheque. The self-loathing some of Fleming's contemporaries talk about was no doubt a result of this suffering.

Edited by Dustin, 17 September 2013 - 08:39 PM.

[Revelator]

Not quite a media sighting, but someone has placed Umberto Eco's classic essay "Narrative Structures in Fleming" online. It can be read here.

Eco's piece is perhaps the most successful application of postmodern critical theory (structuralism in this case) to the Bond books, and is required reading in the realm of Fleming criticism. Someday I'll post a long examination of it, but for the time being, read and enjoy.

[Marketto007]

New photos from the first episodes of “Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond”.

 

http://jamesbondbras...eria-de-imagens

 

xxx

[Revelator]

The New York Times recently printed a discussion titled "James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot: Why Do We Keep Resurrecting the Same Literary Characters?"

The participants were the odious James Parker, who thankfully said little about Bond, and Pankaj Mishra, who did the opposite, though his comments are a mess:

 

Ian Fleming’s James Bond, on the other hand, was a product of Britain’s post-imperial bleakness. Outwitting menacingly acronymed conspirators in warm countries, Bond stoked a fantasy of national potency and significance at a time when, as Dean Acheson remarked, Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. (Appropriately, the Conservative prime minister Anthony Eden recuperated at Fleming’s Caribbean villa after the Suez disgrace of 1956.)

Shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis, widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made store of readerly understanding and good will. As they do with the numerous renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India and Indonesia, audiences respond to familiarity spiced with the right measure of novelty and strangeness. Such tickling of the mass unconscious can be remunerative too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future.

Naming the recent remakes of Bond in his witty book “The Man Who Saved Britain,” Simon Winder blurts out, “I’m sorry: I just can’t go on it’s all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular intervals and tend to have the word ‘Die’ in the title.” The increasingly pained-looking Bond played by Daniel Craig seems to concur.

Britain is geopolitically too insignificant, and non-Western markets — as well as political sensitivities — matter too much now for 007 to be able to fulfill neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination. The artless seducer of women with names like Pussy Galore and Octopussy, a man who once charmingly hoped for sex to have “the sweet tang of rape,” also risks driving away a crucial demographic from the theaters. It is surely a sign of the times that in “Skyfall” a non-misogynist Bond retreats to his family estate in secession-minded Scotland, improbably preoccupied with a childhood trauma after what seems to have been a wholly unexamined life.

“Relax. You need to relax!” the film’s villain taunts him. In the age of Jason Bourne, the C.I.A.'s intriguingly mislaid human drone, and Edward Snowden, Bond does look ready for a long sabbatical. Fans need not despair, however. William Boyd’s Graham Greene-reading Bond in the novel “Solo” hints that recycled myth can occasionally construct a fresh relationship with history. Assigned to protect the interests of oil companies in a nasty West African civil war in 1969, Bond appears to himself as “insubstantial and weak,” even “unmanned”: a fleeting glimpse of the commonplace, everyday tragedy of life — disappointment, failure and decay — that might suit remakes better than thickly costumed farce.

 

It must be so easy to write for the Times--all you need to sound wise is a judicious mix of quote-mining, inability to distinguish between movie Bond and book Bond, dubious taste (Winder's book is "witty"?), and critical tone deafness. Put all that together and presto! instant profundity and ideological certitude, perfectly suited to disguise the fact that you never really answered the title question in the first place.

Edited by Revelator, 13 January 2014 - 08:39 PM.