James Bond was the 20th century’s most famous spy and — almost as certainly — one of its best-known literary characters.
Had he lived, 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, would have just turned 100 years old. A number of new books have been timed to the centenary, and London’s Imperial War Museum is staging an exhibition, “For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond,” which explores the numerous connections between Bond and the author’s real-life experiences, particularly those that occurred during his service with British Naval Intelligence in World War II.
Handsome, charming, witty and sophisticated, cultivated but unpretentious, Fleming imbued his literary alter-ego with many of his own sybaritic tastes, including an abiding pleasure in the company of beautiful women. They shared a prodigious appetite for distilled spirits and cigarettes, of which Fleming smoked about 80 a day. The combination is generally blamed for his early death in 1964 at age 56, attributed variously to heart failure or complications of pleurisy brought about by an ill-advised round of golf (another passion) in foul English weather.
All the Bond books — 12 novels and two collections of short stories — were written over a dozen years, beginning when Fleming was 44, and all were composed during his annual three-month sojourn at his beloved retreat on the Jamaican coast, Goldeneye. (The name was borrowed from a particularly ingenious intelligence operation Fleming conceived during the war.)
There, each day, the author rose early, went for a swim in the cove below his home, then went to work on a portable Remington typewriter for three hours. Cocktails and lunch were served on the terrace with its spectacular views, followed by an hour more of work and the completion of each day’s quota: 2,000 words.
The rest of the day and evening were spent in the glittering company of friends — Noel Coward first among them, but also W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Eden and a “Who’s Who” of British literature and politics.
Real-life spy, ladykiller
The second of four brothers born into a privilged British banking family, Ian attended Eton and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst but was dismissed from both for indiscretions with young women. His mother sent him to the continent to learn French and German in hopes he could pass the Foreign Office exams, which he failed. Fleming took up a career with Reuters, including a stint in Moscow, which left him with a profound revulsion for communism. He subsequently worked as a stockbroker, making a handsome enough income to cut a fashionable figure in the upper reaches of London society.
By 1938, he’d returned to journalism — though probably as cover for his new vocation, espionage. Just before the war, he enlisted as a subaltern in the Black Watch but quickly was recruited as personal assistant to Adm. John Godfrey, the Royal Navy’s director of intelligence. Fleming had what the British like to call “a very good war,” ultimately rising to the rank of commander.
Early on, he engineered the escape of Albania’s King Zog from occupied France, an operation that made time for a spectacular French meal just hours before the Nazis arrived in Dieppe. He ultimately took over supervision of a daring commando unit, whose dashing field commander — Patrick Dalzel-Job — was a major inspiration for James Bond.
After the war, Fleming returned to journalism, built his famous house in Jamaica, which he’d discovered during the conflict, and resumed his life in society, including his affairs, one which left his longtime lover, Lady Ann Rothermere, pregnant.
He wrote his first James Bond novel — “Casino Royale” — while in Jamaica waiting for her divorce from her viscount husband to become final, so that they could marry.
Coming to Fleming’s utterly masterful Bond novels fresh after many years, one is surprised to find just how tough-minded and extraordinarily well written they are. Fleming was a taut and propulsive stylist with a deep gift for characterization. Perhaps because we now see Bond through the gauzy scrim of slightly preposterous films with inevitable political and sexual happy endings, it’s easy to forget that the Bond of Fleming’s books was, in many cases, an unlovely character, often described as “cruel,” his relations with women often aggressively exploitative.
That brings us to the latest in a long series of Bond novels by Fleming impersonators sanctioned by his estate. (The first, “Colonel Sun,” actually was written by Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym Robert Markham.) “Devil May Care” by Sebastian Faulks is the 22nd such book and, though competently enough constructed, belongs more to the cinematic Bond tradition than to the one Fleming tapped out on his Remington.
In this case, Bond is summoned back from a sabbatical in Italy to swinging London during the 1960s. The story revolves around an Eastern Bloc plot to flood the West with heroin, and most of the action occurs in France. It compares with the real thing in about the way a sour apple martini compares with the proper cocktail, shaken, not stirred.
Most of all, what one misses in the work of the Fleming impersonators is the unsentimental confidence of a writer willing to describe his one and only protagonist — and alter ego — as Fleming does with Bond in this passage: “His last action was to slip his right hand under the pillow until it rested under the butt of the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawn barrel. Then he slept, and with the warmth and humor of his eyes extinguished, his features relapsed into a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal and cold.”
