James Bond: The Secret History

by Sean Egan

  Armed with his influences, his first-hand insight into intelligence matters, a facility with the written word and a name for his protagonist, Fleming set about amalgamating them. In devising his own angle on the espionage genre, he became known for several specific plot and style characteristics. Many assumed he invented all of them. This was partly because Bond’s phenomenal success took such characteristics from the ghettoes of pulp into the mainstream. It was also partly because no previous purveyor of this type of material had Fleming’s breeding or his personal contacts in the literary world. He was able to get his books reviewed in the ‘posh papers’ and the likes of The Times Literary Supplement. To reviewers in such outlets – who would never sully their hands with a Dennis Wheatley – his type of writing was new.

  The trademarks he became known for were:

  SEXUAL FRANKNESS: Public discussion of sex – particularly sex outside marriage – was largely taboo at the time Fleming began writing Bond books in the early 1950s. This state of affairs was due to the absence of reliable contraception, a situation that never really changed during Fleming’s lifetime. Those who depicted or discussed in art non-marital sex were often accused of encouraging immorality and undermining the cause of preventing single-motherhood. Fleming’s participation in the disregard of this taboo was therefore shocking. It was also thrilling. His matter-of-fact acknowledgement of sexual desire and depiction of, if not its mechanics, its preamble and aftermath were, on a base level, titillating. This was not least because he was clearly kinky: spanking is mentioned in half a dozen Bond novels, with the secret agent’s first thought of it occurring towards the end of earliest book Casino Royale, and his actually first threatening to take across his lap a wilful female in fifth book From Russia with Love. However, his frankness was also refreshing in a pure sense for people fed up with the circumspection then surrounding this most everyday and pleasurable of human functions, one groan-making manifestation of which was heroes in thrillers making their excuses and leaving when sex looked like raising its supposedly shameful head.

  THE UNOBTAINABLE: The dreary austerity of an already pitilessly class-bound country provided a ready-made audience for Fleming’s semi-posh, jet-setting, casino-haunting creation. There was a notable authenticity to Fleming’s travelogues that added another dimension to their exoticness. ‘I rarely write about places I have not seen,’ he noted. Gambling was illegal in the UK except in private clubs, and even those forms of it that were legal were not allowed to be advertised or encouraged. Even the statement in Diamonds are Forever that Bond is taking his fourth shower of the day fits into this syndrome: hygiene in mid-fifties Britain was commonly a matter of a weekly bath, with showers virtually unknown even in well-to-do households.

  BRAND NAMES: Fleming’s fascination with the non-generic was unusual. The mythical ‘ACME’ was usually posited as the universal manufacturer of the products that appeared in fiction, or else false names were substituted for familiar ones. Fleming once observed, ‘I see no point in changing the name of the Dorchester to the Porchester, or a Rolls-Royce to an Hirondelle.’ Fleming claimed that he inserted such references as a sort of mooring as his settings and plots took off into the sphere of the fantastical – a way to make the reader feel ‘that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground’. However, he must have been aware of their function as product porn: his references to the likes of Chanel and Fleurs des Alpes served to provide a window on another world as much as did Bond’s games of chemin de fer.

  CLASSY VILLAINS: Fleming’s baddies were not Nazi caricatures or belligerent cockneys. Rather, they were larger-than-life personalities with an etiquette incongruous in the context of their murderousness. A set-piece confrontation between Bond and baddie – over a dinner table or similar calm tableaux – became a staple of the part of the narrative just prior to the final, bloody showdown.

  ANTI-HEROISM: Any English professor will tell you that the lead character in a book is a protagonist, not a hero, but James Bond didn’t even fit that neutral term. Fleming would make more than one interview comment down the years indicating that the reader was not expected to like his creation. In a 1958 BBC radio duologue with fellow writer Raymond Chandler, for instance, he observed, ‘… he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man …’ In 1964, Fleming told journalist Ken Purdy, ‘I never intended him to be a particularly likeable person, which makes me wonder a bit about the real motives behind the people who treat him like a cult.’ Fleming told Michael Howard of his publishers Cape that he wrote tenth 007 book, The Spy Who Loved Me, as a ‘cautionary tale’ because ‘young people were making a hero out of James Bond’.

  Tied into this is the changed world in which Bond was operating. Fleming began work on Casino Royale just six months after the disappearance of British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The two men would not be publicly confirmed as having defected to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1956, but it was immediately widely assumed that they had been double agents, something that engendered national humiliation and anger. The members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, as it became known, were not the square-jawed types of espionage fiction but turncoats allied to one of the most monstrous regimes in modern history. With the changes created by this occurrence to public assumptions about heroism and the upper classes, Fleming would seem to have concluded that Bond could not be depicted as operating in a black-and-white world. Ethical ambivalence was now the order of the day. Bond had a clear morality about right and wrong in geopolitical terms – he hated the cruelties of Communism – but on a personal level made what many would consider transgressions, whether it be sleeping with married women or cold-bloodedly dispatching defenceless enemies.

  This in turn fed into a sense of modernity. That Bond was not a practitioner of the Queensberry Rules or an un-nuanced yes-man made him both an antidote to the stiff, Establishment figures of many previous spy books and attractive to a wider demographic. Even working-class people sceptical of values that they felt benefited only people in a higher income bracket could relate to a fornicating rule-bucker.

  While with the above ingredients Fleming may have just been updating or refining already existing – if not necessarily commonplace – espionage elements, there are some things about his work that genuinely were revolutionary:

  PROCEDURAL: Fleming’s naval espionage knowledge, though not always directly transferable and though not acquired from working in the field, provided a verisimilitude of protocol, mentality, terminology and backdrop. Moreover, where he needed more land-based expertise, he could rely on his brother Peter, who had worked in military intelligence during the war. Where Fleming had no direct knowledge or handy source to tap, he did his research, having meetings with, and sending out letters to, experts on relevant subjects and even allowing them to read through early drafts of his manuscripts.

  TEXTURE: Because Fleming intended Bond as a cypher, he gave his character almost none of his own aesthetic bent, the type of which led to his amassing a culturally significant collection of first-edition books. However, that Fleming was a sensualist was written all over his Bond texts. Where previous writers would, in order to keep the action going and the cliffhangers coming, gloss over or even dispense with specifics of clothes, food, drink, travel and surroundings, Fleming would explore his hero’s observations and experiences in rich, leisurely and even digressive detail. Action and setup took an incongruous back seat.

  VULNERABILITY: Despite occasional ruthlessness, Bond does not exult in violence in the manner of the likes of Templar or Drummond. He often ruefully reflects on having had to engage in it. Additionally, although good at his job, he is by no means a preternaturally poised operative, cheating death through serendipity as often as by ingenuity or bravery. He is also in the habit of availing himself of Benzedrine to sharpen his reflexes.

  SALARY MAN: Perhaps Fleming’s most interesting departure from the espionage genre is th
e fact that his protagonist was not a freelancer. Bulldog Drummond and the Saint were adventurers of independent means, the American ‘gumshoes’ were self-employed, the protagonists of the works of Buchan and Ambler were often hapless ordinary people caught up by chance in forces beyond their understanding. There had, of course, always been salaried policemen and government spies in thrillers. However, rarely, if ever, had there been a man like 007. Bond got entangled in the most outrageous adventures, but they resulted from his job as a civil servant and, like anybody who answers to an employer, he was subject to rules, process and routine. For a society that universal education and decreasing deference had made more knowing and less credulous, this placing of the hero within the same exigencies of existence with which the average mortal had to contend was an intriguing and pleasing step forward. Moreover, Bond’s government job raised the stakes: his missions involved not some common-or-garden delinquency but risk to the world order.

  Despite his background knowledge, Fleming’s depiction of espionage work was in no way the most authentic. Even the convincing procedural detail that often led up to his fantastical developments and denouements were sometimes nonsensical. For instance, Duns observes, ‘In real-life espionage, you already have your intelligence officer or officers in the city involved and have a network of people all over the world. When there’s a crisis in Paris, then the person who speaks fluent French who’s been in Paris for three years deals with it. The idea that you send in this one guy into all these places all over the world – that’s a fantasy premise.’

  However, the espionage paradigm Fleming created was the one to which the world took more than any other. From a point within around half a dozen years after Bond’s entrée, every espionage story would be compared to Fleming’s tales and, later, the films derived from them. It therefore came to feel the most natural paradigm even if it wasn’t the most authentic. The shadow it cast over the genre was so huge that spy novelists and filmmakers to this day fight off accusations of imitation when they adhere to it, and are perceived to be almost comically self-conscious when they deviate from it.

  That was then. Today, sex is ubiquitous, gambling is legal, global travel and brand names affordable and lack of deferentialism pretty much the norm. If published for the first time today, the values of the Bond books would not inspire the wonder they once did.

  But, then, the mantle of the James Bond paradigm for espionage tales was long ago passed from the books to the films, which – as well as distributing it more widely – heightened it, stylised it, sanitised it and continuously updated it. One could even make the claim that Fleming deserves little credit for the James Bond cinema construct, which was already largely out of his hands even before his death and which has been expanded, traduced, refined and toyed with ever since. Nonetheless, the essential idea of Bond purveyed by his creator – a preternaturally able, unusually handsome, sexually voracious, epicurean British secret agent granted a licence to kill by his employer – has survived all the upheavals and redrawings of approach necessitated by box-office returns, alterations in actors and changes in cultural standards across the course of half a century. This must count for something in terms of Fleming’s legacy, to say the least.

  As must one thing missing from the above list of ingredients in Fleming’s Bond books: high-grade writing. The genre wasn’t necessarily bereft of such before Bond. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and several post-World War II novels by Graham Greene are espionage tomes few intellectuals would be ashamed to have on their bookshelves. In an unusually non-self-deprecating comment, Fleming stated that his objective was ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’. He would never have been so immodest as to state whether he felt he had been successful in this object, but he assuredly was. He managed to weld the outlandish plots of pulpier writers to the smooth-flowing, economical, evocative and often exquisite prose style of the type of novelists who won literary awards.

  While Fleming’s skill may be irrelevant to the millions who continue to flock to Bond films – most of whom have probably never read a Bond novel – it’s to be doubted that Bond would have become a filmable proposition without the springboard to mass public attention provided by the author’s classy template.

  Moreover, the original literary incarnation of Bond has a purity and legitimacy no film – however well made – can ever claim. Not for nothing did, post-Roger Moore, ‘I went back to the books’ become a mantra for actors taking on the role of 007. This was not just an implicit repudiation of the way the film franchise had sagged into softness over the course of the seventies and eighties but an acknowledgement of the power and lodestar status of the source material.

  ENTER: THE SECRET AGENT

  Goldeneye was the location of the writing of the first drafts of all of Fleming’s Bond stories, starting on 15 January 1952 with Casino Royale.

  While the poise of his prose might suggest long, even agonised, deliberation, an inspection of Fleming’s modus operandi reveals anything but. Casino Royale’s 62,000-word manuscript was completed in no more than eight weeks. This was actually a slow rate for Fleming: he would later so refine the process that he was able to produce 2,000 words a day, which equated to completion of a draft in six weeks. Of course, that was not the end of the process. Or indeed the start of it: Fleming’s mind percolated ideas over a long period, during which he conducted research and jotted down ideas in notebooks. However, writing a manuscript quickly made commensurately easier the revising and enriching subsequently executed in Jamaica or back in Britain.

  Fleming explained his technique in a May 1963 Books and Bookmen article called ‘How To Write a Thriller’: ‘By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished …’ He disclosed that he didn’t even pause to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. ‘When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings.’

  Despite what would be an increasing boredom with his creation, Fleming’s productivity for the next dozen years was utterly dependable. His disciplined routine at Goldeneye – the 2,000-word target reached via three hours’ work in the morning and another hour in the evening – ensured that a new James Bond book would be published in his native country in either March or April each year.

  James Bond, we learn during the course of the narrative of Casino Royale, lives in a flat in Chelsea (in later books revealed to be in an unnamed square off the King’s Road, where he is tended to by his ‘treasure’ of a housekeeper, May), smokes at least seventy cigarettes a day of a Balkan and Turkish mixture custom-made by Morlands of Grosvenor Street and decorated with a triple gold band (not mentioned by Fleming at any time is that the bands would seem to refer to Bond’s/Fleming’s naval rank of commander) and, as a consequence of his bachelorhood and his attention to detail, takes ‘a ridiculous’ pleasure in food and drink. His only hobby is his supercharged 4.5-litre circa 1933 vintage Bentley (although it occurs to the reader that his stated love of gambling would also surely fall into the hobby category). He has invented his own elaborate dry martini drink, which he intends one day to patent (three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet, shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel – all served in a deep champagne goblet). He is a deductive man, for example instantly clocking some elderly inn-keepers as a childless couple whose frustrated affection is lavished on their guests and pets. At some point in the hazy future, Bond intends to resign and travel the world.

  When Bond sleeps, his face is ironical, brutal and cold, although this is offset when he is awake by his eyes’ warmth and humour. That face – at least according to supporting character Vesper in conversation with French agent René Mathis – is both very good-looking and resembles that of famou
s songwriter Hoagy Carmichael. Bond disagrees with this comparison when gazing into a mirror (although – in an example of the frequent continuity clumsiness in Fleming’s canon – we are not told how he came to know of Vesper’s remark). He finds himself looking at a face into which are set a pair of ironically inquiring grey-blue eyes, over the right of which hangs a comma of hair that will never stay in place. Together with the thin vertical scar down his right cheek, the effect is ‘faintly piratical’. (In future books we will learn his height is an even six feet.)

  Professionally we discover that Bond works for the ‘Secret Service’, an adjunct to the British Defence Ministries, and has done so since before the war, as World War II was usually referred to then. ‘The Service’ is located on the ninth floor of a tall, grey building overlooking Regent’s Park in Central London. There, he answers to a chief of staff known as M, whom Bond worships even despite his harrumphing crustiness. Psychologists will be interested to learn that as a boy Fleming called his mother ‘M’. (Later in the series we will learn that M is an admiral and a knight named Miles Messervy.)

  When Bond’s cigarette lighter is mentioned herein, where most authors of the time would have made no comment on it further than its function, Fleming takes great care to specify it to be a black, oxidised Ronson. Yet the one major exception Fleming made to his preference for using names and brands from real life was Bond’s employer. There was, and is, no organisation with the title the Secret Service, even if it is obvious what is its real-life counterpart: the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6. Lightly disguising an existing organisation is, of course, a literary tradition employed for the same sorts of reasons as giving one’s hero a name different from the person or persons on whom he is based. Those reasons range from discretion to convenience to fear of libel writs to a disinclination to distract the reader. In addition to all or any of those things, Fleming was to some extent hamstrung by the Official Secrets Act and the interrelated fact that SIS/MI6 did not officially exist. As late as 1966, the British Government barred the usage in print of even the generalised phrase ‘British Secret Service’. Although this was a King Canute mandate, Fleming was an ex-intelligence man and therefore presumably bound by loyalty where he wasn’t the law. Moreover, as someone who picked up titbits of information at MI6 dinners, he would also have been conscious of the need to keep valuable sources on-side.