Fleming himself thought of the books as schoolboy literature. He wrote from Goldeneye to one close friend that he was writing the final pages of a B.O.P. (The Boys' Own Paper was a boys' magazine from Victorian days which presented adventure stories of a pure, patriotic nature). Naomi Burton believes that Fleming was capable of writing a much more literary work than the Bond books. The problem was that he was afraid of the criticism he would receive from Anne and her intellectual circle. He asked a mutual acquaintance to tell Naomi that he refused to write a "good" book. He admitted having the mind of a mischievous "boy scout" and that was the material his agent would be forced to hawk until he became aged and sagacious and wrote a book about his sad boyhood.
Noel Coward supported this theory. In his diary entry for Sunday, January 25, 1955, he wrote:
I have read Ian's new thriller in proof. It is the best he has done yet, very exciting and, although as usual too far-fetched, not quite so much so as the last two and there are fewer purple sex passages. His observation is extraordinary and his talent for description vivid. I wish he would try a non-thriller for a change; I would so love him to triumph over the sneers of Annie's intellectual friends.
It is said that Fleming wanted to dedicate CASINO ROYALE to Anne but she objected. She told him that "you do not dedicate a book like this to anyone."
Fionn Morgan says that Anne did not actually disapprove of James Bond; she was unhappy with the image and way of life the character had brought to Fleming. "She was secretly proud of him but publicly felt she had to stick to her guns that they weren't of high literary value." William Plomer said that Fleming felt "eclipsed" by James Bond in his later years. And indeed. Fleming's lifestyle did change in the last few years of his life. Fionn Morgan also states that he was probably the type of man who couldn't handle success well; he attempted to live up to an expected image. His smoking and drinking increased, and as a result, his health deteriorated. One close friend says that Ian was terribly unhappy the last few years of his life—he was frustrated with his marriage and the slowness of success, but mainly with his inability to live the life of his fantasy.
It is no wonder that the later Bond novels have a peculiar tone of impending doom and despair. Some of the painful and traumatic incidents through which Bond lives perhaps alleviated the plight of Fleming's own existence. Through James Bond, he could escape from the routine boredom of the "soft life," which was precisely what his reality had become. It was something he had fought until he was forty-three, but he had succumbed to it and there was no turning back. This striving for adventure and extracting excitement and stimuli from the daily situation became the motivation behind the writing of the James Bond novels. Despite the overwhelming success of the books, James Bond was an extremely personal creation for Ian Fleming. It was his very own escape route—his custom-made drug. Even though at times he wanted to forget all about James Bond, he found himself writing the latest opus every winter of every year. It was the intensity and energy with which Fleming struggled against the "soft life" that finally killed him.
Fleming once told Ivar Bryce that "after age fifty, one must really love every day—if one is allowed to." This perfectly captures the essence of Ian Fleming. He was a man who wanted the most out of life; he was constantly striving to achieve a goal which, once won, could not fully satisfy him. The man's lust for life is what made him the personality his friends like to remember. As James Bond lives on in new novels and motion pictures, it is fitting to picture Ian Fleming as William Plomer described him in his memorial address at St Bartholomew's Church: ". . . on top of the world, with his foot on the accelerator, laughing at absurdities, enjoying discoveries, absorbed in his many interests and plans, fascinated and amused by places and people and facts and fantasies, an entertainer of millions, and for us a friend never to be forgotten."
PART THREE: JAMES BOND—A PORTRAIT
Ian Fleming behind the wheel of a 4 1/2-litre Bentley (but does it have an Amherst Villiers supercharger?), the same car James Bond drives in CASINO ROYALE and MOONRAKER. After the automobile's demise in the latter novel, Bond drives a Mark II Continental Bentley in the remaining Fleming series. (Photo by Loomis Dean, Life Magazine. © Copyright 1962 by Time, Inc.)
BACKGROUND AND EARLY LIFE
The James Bond character remains fairly elusive in the early novels; not until the fifth book, FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE, does a personality truly begin to develop. Some of Bond's vague personal life is touched on in the third novel, MOONRAKER, but it is in GOLDFINGER (the seventh novel) that Ian Fleming provides a more complete picture of the character's "normal" life. In the twelfth novel, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, the details of James Bond's childhood and school years are finally presented in the form of an obituary. John Pearson, Ian Fleming's biographer, published an intriguing book in 1973 entitled James Bond—the Authorized Biography of 007, which embellishes the few incidents in Bond's early life that are mentioned in the Fleming series. In addition, Pearson creates a completely fleshed-out existence since Bond's birth, according to Pearson, in 1920. I will not attempt to summarize these additional events in Bond's life created by Pearson, but only deal with the facts provided by Fleming. It should also be noted that the James Bond character of the novels is quite different from the figure as presented on film. The literary Bond is much more realistic; he's a serious individual with very human qualities. (The film version of James Bond is a larger-than-life superhuman, and this character will be examined in Part Five.)
Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R., was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud. John Pearson selects November 11 (Armistice Day), 1920, as Bond's birthday, but there is no evidence pointing to this in the Fleming novels. The obituary appearing in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE asserts that Bond was seventeen when he left school; and by "claiming the age of nineteen," he entered a branch of what was subsequently to become the Ministry of Defense in 1941. If, as Fleming states, Bond was seventeen in 1941, then he was actually born in 1924.
Andrew Bond was a foreign representative of the Vickers armaments firm; therefore, Bond's early life was spent abroad. While living in Germany, the young
James Bond acquired a first-class command of French and German.
Fleming reveals the only clue to Bond's childhood interests in the opening chapter of ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, while the character reminisces at the beach:
It reminded him almost too vividly of childhood—of the velvet feel of the hot powder sand, and the painful grit of wet sand between young toes when the time came for him to put his shoes and socks on, of the precious little pile of sea-shells and interesting wrack on the sill of his bedroom window ('No, we'll have to leave that behind, darling. It'll dirty up your trunk!'), of the small crabs scuttling away from the nervous fingers groping beneath the seaweed in the dancing waves—always in those days, it seemed, lit with sunshine—and then the infuriating, inevitable 'time to come out' It was all there, his own childhood, spread out before him to have another look at. What a long time ago they were, those spade-and-bucket days! How far had he come since the freckles and the Cadbury milk-chocolate Flakes and the fizzy lemonade!
(ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, Chapter 1)
When he was eleven years old, both of Bond's parents were killed in a climbing accident in the Aiguilles Rouges above Chamonix. The youth came under the guardianship of an aunt, Miss Charmian Bond; he went to live with her at the "quaintly named hamlet of Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent" Aunt Charmian, a most learned and proficient lady, completed Bond's early education and prepared him for an English public school. Since he had been entered at birth by his father for Eton, Bond passed satisfactorily into the school at "age 12 or thereabouts."
Like Fleming, Bond left Eton early. Bond's career there was "brief and undistinguished." After only two halves, Bond allegedly got into some trouble with one of the boys' maids, and Aunt Charmian was asked to remove him. Bond was then sent to Fettes,
his father's old school, where the environment was "somewhat Calvinistic, and both academic and athletic standards were rigorous." The youthful Bond was inclined to be solitary by nature, but he established strong friendships among the traditionally famous athletic circles at the school. Bond fought twice for the school as a lightweight and also founded the first serious judo class at an English public school.
A sketch of Ian Fleming's description of James Bond. The bone structure resembles that of Hoagy Carmichael, and the eyes and mouth hold a hint of "cruelty." (Illustration by George Almond.)
The losing of his innocence in Paris at the age of sixteen is the next major development in Bond's life:
If he wanted a solid drink he had it at Harry's Bar, both because of the solidarity of the drinks and because, on his first ignorant visit to Paris at the age of sixteen, he had done what Harry's advertisement in the Continental Daily Mail had told him to do and had said to his taxi-driver, 'Sank Roo Doe Noo.' That had started one of the memorable evenings of his life, culminating in the loss, almost simultaneous, of his virginity and his notecase.
("From a View to a Kill," FOR YOUR EYES ONLY)
At the early age of seventeen, Bond left school. Fleming mentions in FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE that Bond attended the University of Geneva for a while (as did the author). There, he presumably was taught to ski by Hannes Oberhauser of Kitzbuhel. Like Fleming, Bond was happiest in Kitzbuhel. There are references to this in the short story, "Octopussy."
Bond's first work with the British Secret Service was before the war, according to a brief reference in CASINO ROYALE. Reportedly, he sat in the casino at Monte Carlo for two months watching a Roumanian team "work their stuff with the invisible ink and the dark glasses." According to the Head of S., Bond and the Deuxieme "bowled them out in the end," and Bond turned in a million francs he had won. Bond couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen at the time. (When Ian Fleming began writing the novels, he didn't intend to pen as many as he did. As more and more books were written, Fleming had to tinker with Bond's early life—that is, change dates—so that Bond would be the appropriate age. In CASINO ROYALE, for example, Bond claims he bought his 41/2-litre Bentley "almost new in 1933." Bond's age couldn't have been more than nine! Dates like these were corrected in later novels.)
Bond entered a branch of what was subsequently to become the Ministry of Defense in 1941. He was given the rank of lieutenant in the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserves, and ended the war with the rank of Commander. After the war, the head of the Secret Service, M, became aware of Bond's service record. He accepted Commander Bond's postwar application to continue working for the Ministry in which he had risen to the rank of Principal Officer in the Civil Service.
Bond was awarded a Double-0 number in the Service for two jobs briefly described in CASINO ROYALE. The first was in New York. A Japanese cipher expert was cracking British codes on the thirty-sixth floor of the R.C.A. building in Rockefeller Center, where the Japanese had their consulate. Bond took a room on the fortieth floor of the next-door skyscraper, and he could look across the street into the decoder's room. Bond was helped by a colleague and a couple of Remington thirty-thirties with telescopic sights and silencers. The guns were smuggled to Bond's room, where the men sat for days wailing for the chance to gun down the cipher expert. Since the windows at Rockefeller Center were of heavy glass, a bullet would deflect and miss a target on the inside. Therefore, Bond's colleague shot first in order to blast a hole through the window so that Bond could shoot the Japanese through the opening. Bond was successful—he shot the cipher expert in the mouth as the man turned to gape at the broken window.
The second job was in Stockholm. Bond's assignment was to kill a Norwegian who was doubling against the British for the Germans. The Norwegian had managed to get two British agents captured and probably killed. Bond eliminated the double agent in the man's bedroom, using a knife. Bond claims that this particular job wasn't as clean as the first one.
For those two jobs, Bond was awarded the number 007, which gave him the license to kill in the line of duty. In 1954, Bond was appointed a C.M.G. (Companion to the Order of St Michael and St George) for his duties with the Ministry, and M notes that these duties were performed with "outstanding bravery and distinction, although occasionally, through an impetuous strain in his nature, with a streak of the foolhardy that brought him in conflict with higher authority." But Bond possessed what M calls "The Nelson Touch" in moments of the highest emergency, and "somehow contrived to escape more or less unscathed from the many adventurous paths down which his duties led him."
Today, James Bond would be in his late fifties. John Gardner, in resurrecting the Bond series with the publication of LICENSE RENEWED, has more or less picked up the Bond character from the sixties and placed him intact in the 1980s relatively unchanged. This is a little disconcerting for Bond fans who have followed the character since the beginning. Avoiding any specific reference to age, the only clue that Gardner gives to Bond's advancing years is that a little grey is showing at his temples.
APPEARANCE
The first impression of James Bond's appearance is uttered by Vesper Lynd in CASINO ROYALE:
"He is very good-looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless in his…"
(CASINO ROYALE, Chapter 5)
This sentence is never finished due to an interruption (and a nasty one at that—an explosion outside smashes the window over the table at which Vesper is sitting). Later on, Bond examines himself in the mirror:
His grey-blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry and the short lock of black hair which would never stay in place subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow. With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek the general effect was faintly piratical. Not much of Hoagy Carmichael there, thought Bond, as he filled a flat, light gunmetal box with fifty of the Morland cigarettes with a triple gold band. Mathis had told him of the girl's comment
(CASINO ROYALE, Chapter 8)
In the next novel, LIVE AND LET DIE, not much is added to this basic description. Again, Bond is looking into a mirror and notices that the "thick comma of black hair" has lost some of its tail. He notes that nothing could be done about the thin vertical scar down his right cheek—the FBI had experimented with Covermark—or about the "coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes." But there was the "mixed blood of America in the black hair and high cheekbones which might pass him off as an American except, Bond notes, with women.
And, in MOONRAKER:
Bond knew that there was something alien and un-English about himself. He knew that he was a difficult man to cover up.
(MOONRAKER, Chapter 4)
For the first time, Bond is described in MOONRAKER as being "rather satumine"—an adjective which could have applied to Fleming himself.
Finally, in FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE, a complete picture of Bond's face is found in SMERSH's file:
It was a dark, clean-cut face, with a three-inch scar showing whitely down the sunburned skin of the right cheek. The eyes were wide and level under straight, rather long black brows. The hair was black, parted on the left, and carelessly brushed so that a thick black comma fell down over the right eyebrow. The longish straight nose ran down to a short upper lip below which was a wide and finely drawn but cruel mouth. The line of the jaw was straight and firm. A section of dark suit, white shirt and black knitted tie completed the picture.
(FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE, Chapter 6)
The dossier goes on and states other statistics: Bond's height is 183 centimetres (a little over six feet). His weight is seventy-six kilograms (a little over 167 pounds), and he has a slim build.
Since then, Bond has always been described as having "dark, rather cruel good looks." This is the quality which women find irresistible.
CLOTHING AND OTHER PERSONAL HABITS
James Bond usually wears a dark-blue serge suit with a white shirt made of silk.
Bond's suits are almost always single-breasted and very lightweight. For casual wear, Bond sports a sleeveless dark blue Sea Island cotton shirt and navy blue tropical worsted trousers. Bond likes comfortable soft leather or moccasin shoes, usually in black (he abhors shoelaces). At times Bond wears a black, knitted silk tie.
Bond also likes pajamas. In CASINO ROYALE, he wears a pajama coat from Hong Kong. (Bond is teased a bit by his American colleagues during the LIVE AND LET DIE case—"We mostly sleep in the raw in America, Mr. Bond.")
Bond takes cold showers. Sometimes he takes a cold shower immediately following a very hot one. The stinging temperature of a cold shower stimulates the nerves in his body. He uses Pinaud Elixir, "that prince among shampoos," and prefers Guerlain's "Fleurs des Alpes" over Camay. Bond usually begins his day with twenty slow pushups, "lingering over each one so that his muscles have no rest." Then, he rolls over and performs leg lifts until "his stomach muscles scream." Next, he touches his toes twenty times and moves on to arm and chest exercises combined with deep breathing "until he is dizzy."
The James Bond Bedside Companion Page 12
