by John Pearson
It was that look, says Bond, that cured him. Just a few hours before he had seriously thought of shooting the American. Now he was grateful for the chance to buy the man a drink.
It was all most civilized. They talked about New York and San Francisco. Bond promised to look them up next time he was in the States. He wished them both good luck, and then kissed Tiffany goodbye. As he drove back to Chelsea he thought of sending Tiffany some roses, but couldn't find a flower-shop.
‘Perhaps,’ as he says now, ‘it was as well.’
13
The Soft Life
HONEYCHILE SCHULTZ WAS winning, there was no doubt about it. Now Bond was in danger of becoming Mr Schultz the second. The story he had told of his affair with Tiffany merely underlined the fact. Until then I hadn't realized how weak he really was with women once they had got through his defences. I should have recognized the pattern earlier. Those one-night stands of his, the hit-and-run affairs, the rigidly controlled relationships with firmly married women were quite simply the manoeuvres of a man determined to keep womankind at bay.
Fleming had understood this perfectly when he said that Bond, like most hard men, was soft inside. Bond was essentially sentimental and at heart a vulnerable lover. And Honeychile, who was quite the opposite, must have appreciated this, especially after yesterday. The moral of the Tiffany affair was certainly not lost on her.
Bond, though, appeared oblivious of what was going on: he had other worries on his mind. After our day aboard the Honeychile I had been hoping to continue with the story of his life from 1955 – the year made memorable by the assignment Fleming has described in that most colourful of all his books, From Russia With Love. Bond had other ideas. I was sitting on the terrace after breakfast and wading through a day-old copy of the New York Times when he appeared. He was smartly dressed in regulation James Bond dark blue shirt and freshly laundered white duck trousers. He had, he said, to spend the day with Mrs Schultz, but was expecting a telephone call from London. Would I please be sure to take it for him when it came.
‘From whom?’ He paused.
‘From Universal Export. From M. to be precise. I've been attempting to get through to him all week. I can't imagine what he's up to. Moneypenny promised to make sure he rang.’
‘And if he does, what do I say?’
‘Just tell him that we've nearly finished and that I hope to see him soon. Tell him …’ At that moment there was a sharp blare from a car at the front of the hotel. Mrs Schultz was waving from her Rolls. Bond shrugged his shoulders. ‘Tell him I'd like to know what's going on.’
But M. didn't ring, and it was late that evening when Bond reappeared at the hotel. Honeychile was with him looking, as the gossip columnists say, ‘quite radiant’. There was a hint of power in her beauty now, a subtle gleam of triumph in those wide blue eyes. She did the talking, Bond, by and large, the drinking. They had been deep-sea fishing. Bond had apparently caught an eight-foot swordfish. The idea seemed out of character, but she made much of how he had played and handled it, ‘just like a real professional’.
‘I never knew you were a fisherman,’ I said.
‘I'm not. Fishing's for old men.’
‘Not our sort of fishing, darling,’ Honeychile insisted. ‘Ours is for rich men.’
Bond said nothing, but when she left asked, ‘Well, did he call?’
When I said no he shook his head and said, ‘Well, I suppose that settles it. This would have amused Ian. Didn't they try to make him take up fishing when he retired?’
‘Who's talking of retirement?’
‘I am. I've had enough of hanging on here, waiting while they decide whether to have me back or not. Thank God for the lamented Mr Schultz – and for his fortune, and his wife.’
‘Won't you be bored?’ I said.
‘Bored? Not as bored as I would be in London, waiting while they decide if I'm still fit for just one more assignment. I've had enough of it. It's always been the same.’
‘What has?’
‘The uncertainty and boredom – waiting and wondering whether you're still up to scratch, and all the time hanging on until M. is ready to employ you. Fleming knew how it felt – he described it when he wrote about the summer after Tiffany had gone. That was the first time in my life when I actually woke up in the morning feeling bored.’
This had been an ominous development for Bond, the first but not the last time in his life when he had found himself without his customary zest for living. Normally Bond lived at such a pitch of sheer activity that this stagnation was unbearable, and what Fleming called ‘the blubbery arms of the soft life’ soon had him round the neck. He started feeling suffocated.
At first Bond put this whole mood down to Tiffany's departure. When it refused to go he realized the truth. The life that he had led was catching up with him, nature was taking its revenge. Perhaps he had asked too much even of his iron nerves and shatter-proof physique, and that summer's boredom was no passing phase but a cumulative affliction of the spirit which was to cause him trouble in the years ahead.
It also set a pattern to his life. From now on he would increasingly rely on his assignments to keep the boredom of his normal life at bay; and not for nothing was he to describe boredom as ‘the only vice I utterly condemn’. The strange inertia I was seeing in him now, clearly began way back in that summer of 1955, when he was thirty-four.
The Turkish mission, which Fleming wrote about in From Russia With Love was an important one for Bond in many ways – not least because it stopped him wallowing in depression. But there were other factors too which made this whole assignment something of a turning point in Bond's career.
Fleming's outline of the mission is surprisingly accurate (indeed at one stage M. was threatening to stop the book under the Official Secrets Act. He still maintains it gave too much away). Certainly Smersh did plan to involve Bond in a carefully planned scandal in Istanbul, as Fleming said they did. The bait was a beautiful young woman carefully trained and selected from their own organization. Her name, as Fleming says, was Tatiana Romanova and she was pretending to defect with the latest Russian cypher machine, the Spektor. Bond was sent out by M. to meet her. He slept with her, became convinced she was in love with him, and it was during their return to London on the Orient Express that Bond met and, against all the odds, defeated the trained Russian killer Granitsky, alias Donovan Grant.
This was a very real setback to the cold hard men in Smersh. Indeed, this incident was more of a victory for Bond than Fleming could reveal. For, naturally, the Turkish mission has to be assessed against the peculiar background of Bond's whole secret service life. The truth was that this attempt by Smersh was simply one more episode in their vendetta against Bond. Granitsky was intended to avenge the one-time top assassin in Smersh, Chiffre's killer, Oborin. But there was more to it than that. By now the directorate of Smersh had found out the truth about the James Bond books and realized the scale of the deception. There was some pressure to have the facts made public, but this was powerfully resisted by the redoubtable General Grubozaboyschikov, the head of Smersh. He had his enemies within the party and as a wily apparatchik who had survived both Stalin and Beria, he knew how dangerous such revelations of his gullibility could be. Lesser mistakes had cost much greater men their heads.
Instead the General reacted like the determined man he was. All the proof, so carefully prepared for months, of James Bond's existence was quietly consigned to the incinerators behind the Smersh headquarters on the Sretenka Ulitsa. And at the same time a foolproof plan was hatched to destroy the real-life Bond as well. This (and not the slightly flimsy argument that Fleming gives) was the real reason why a killer like Granitsky was brought in to murder him. This was why such elaborate plans were laid to tempt him out to Istanbul, and this was also why Bond's victory aboard the Orient Express was such a triumph.
But the events of these few autumn days in 1955 played their part not only in Bond's subsequent career but also in his legend. Fle
ming has described the frantic way that Smersh still tried to murder him. Even in Paris he had to face the arch-spy Rosa Klebb – disguised as a sweet old lady knitting in the Ritz – and as we know, the lethal dose of Japanese blow-fish poison from her knife-edged heel all but finished him. Thanks to Bond's stamina (and possibly the low quality of Soviet fugu that year), he survived.
It was at this point that General Grubozaboyschikov chose to act like the realist he was. The vendetta against this agent Bond was clearly getting out of hand. Smersh had lost Oborin, Granitsky and now Rosa Klebb. Even by Russian standards, this was excessive.
Surely the best plan was quite simply to allow Bond to continue as the hero of the Fleming books. Why unmask him? Why even try to kill him – especially now that it appeared that he was in a dreadful state from fugu poisoning? The Russian evidence of his existence was destroyed and it was inconceivable that he would operate against the Soviet again. Quoting the words of an ancient Cossack proverb, Comrade General Grubozaboyschikov decided he would ‘let sleeping moujiks snore’.
This decision of the General's produced the ironic situation which has continued ever since – for until today the Soviet and British Secret Services have had a shared interest in concealing Bond's existence. Certainly after the fiasco of the Smersh conspiracy outlined in Fleming's book, From Russia With Love, James Bond was safe from inadvertent exposure by the Russians.
Not that this really worried him that autumn. He had more serious problems on his plate, and even Fleming was soon talking as if this book would be the last that he would write about his hero. His summer boredom was essentially a symptom of a more profound disorder and the strain of his Turkish mission (the quite extraordinary physical demands of the oversexed Miss Romanova and the struggle with his appalling enemy, Granitsky) had virtually exhausted him. The real trouble was fatigue. This was why he bungled the end of the assignment. As he says, had he been on form, la Klebb could not have hoped to trick him in the way she did, only his blurred reactions let her get in that all but winning kick.
But others slipped up too – even that normally astute young Frenchman, Ren Mathis. A man of his experience should certainly have known better than to have consigned Rosa Klebb to headquarters in a laundry basket without searching her. (At the subsequent inquiry he shouldered all responsibility for the woman's death. She had swallowed a concealed cyanide capsule and was quite dead on arrival at the headquarters of the Deuxime Bureau.)
Bond had a bad few weeks that autumn, and he spent several days, heavily guarded and sedated, in a small private nursing home in Paris. He says that the first effect of the drug was enormous pain and a feeling of asphyxia. He never quite lost consciousness, and owed his life entirely to Mathis who gave him artificial respiration till the doctor came. At first it was seriously feared that the drug would cause permanent paralysis or damage to the nervous system. Thanks to Bond's stamina it didn't. A fortnight later Bond was flown home aboard a specially dispatched R.A.F. Transport Command Comet. He spent another week in the London Clinic, where he was tested and examined by several of the country's top medical scientists. They pronounced him virtually recovered. M. (who incidentally hadn't visited him in hospital) awaited his return to duty.
It wasn't quite that simple. Bond was in no state to work. The symptoms of the ‘soft life’ which had afflicted him that summer seemed to have returned and, loner that he was, Bond found that there was nobody to turn to. The Russian girl, Tatiana, had disappeared completely from his life (after a long interrogation she changed her name and went as a sponsored immigrant to Australia. Bond isn't certain where). Aunt Charmian had moved to Sussex.
Luckily for Bond there was one man who could help him – the remarkable neurologist and consultant to the Secret Service, Sir James Molony. Bond is devoted to him, and still insists that he all but saved his reason. Certainly the two men have remained great friends, with Molony as the nearest thing to a psychiatrist and father confessor in Bond's scheme of things. He has also proved to be a useful ally – particularly against M. when the need arose – and has played a vital part in maintaining Bond's efficiency ever since. It is an intriguing story.
Bond still remembers the first evening when Molony visited him in Wellington Square. Bond at the time was incommunicado, finding it hard to sleep or to face anyone. Sir James had quite a job persuading May (who was very worried) to let him in. He had, he said, brought Bond a present – a bottle of Wild Turkey – and was to stay up half the night to help him drink it. At first Bond was suspicious, he'd had his fill of doctors in the last few days, but as he told himself, this was the first who had brought him anything to drink. Sir James seemed unconcerned at Bond's moroseness. A Dubliner, he had what the Irish call ‘a way with him’ and gradually Bond did what he'd never done before – he started talking of his childhood and parents and his early life. Sir James was a skilled listener – and drinker. Before the night was over he knew more about James Bond than anyone.
From long experience with the Secret Service he recognized Bond's type. He was what he called a ‘puritan romantic’ whose divided nature was in constant conflict with itself.
‘You mean,’ said Bond, ‘I've never grown up?’
‘No, not at all. It's simply that you've never managed to resolve the two sides of your nature. Rather the reverse – the way of life you've plumped for naturally exaggerates them, hence the conflict.’
‘How do you mean?’ said Bond.
‘One side of you, the Scottish puritan, longs to have everything in order. It's basically your father's influence – it's obvious from your flat and from the way you dress. It's in your face as well. But then the other side of you, your mother's side, gets sick of all this order and restraint. That's when you break out and start longing to escape. The trouble is that the puritan lets you do this only in the line of duty, on some legitimate assignment. Small wonder that there's so much tension.’
Molony said all this so calmly that Bond suddenly felt scared.
‘You mean that there's no cure?’ he said.
‘Not really. None at all. This is quite simply what you are. It's probably as well to know it and to face it. Then we can do something about it.’
‘But does it mean I'm finished with the Service?’
‘Not if you're sensible. This character of yours is what makes you perfect for your job, you have the ideal psychology. Why else d'you think that you've survived so long?’
‘What's wrong with me then?’
‘At times like this the tension between the two sides of your nature simply gets too much. That's when the boredom and the lethargy begin. And that's what we must fight.’
‘Can we?’ said Bond.
‘Oh, certainly. I've worked out a therapy for men like you.’
The ‘therapy’ began next day at Sir James Molony's big country house near Sevenoaks. It turned out to be an intensive crash course in what he called ‘enhanced living’. (This had been evolved in principle for jaded senior executives and men from the professions. Sir James adapted it to Bond's requirements. He was intrigued to see how Bond responded.) There was a lot of so-called ‘basic exercise’ – running and swimming and gymnasium work. There was fast driving and an afternoon spent on a carefully devised assault course. There were a succession of complex intellectual and mathematical conundra ‘simply to stretch the brain’, plus massage, dietary control and medical tests. Sir James drove him hard – and was not surprised when Bond responded.
Even so, he was concerned for Bond – and Bond is still grateful for the way that he stuck up for him with M. M. of course made no allowances for anyone (although he asked for none himself) and many readers of the Fleming books have found the famous conversation between M. and Sir James early in Dr. No ‘heartless and distasteful’ as one reviewer put it. Certainly M. did appear unpleasantly cold-blooded in his attitude towards a loyal subordinate. There is something chilling in the way he talked of Bond as if he were totally expendable – ‘won't be the first one that
's cracked’ – and then went on to list that scarifying catalogue of all the bits and pieces which the average human being can dispense with – ‘gall bladder, spleen, tonsils, appendix, one of his two kidneys, one of his two lungs, two of his four or five quarts of blood, two-fifths of his liver, most of his stomach and half of his brain’.
But Bond loyally insisted that this was really an example of M.'s rough-and-ready sense of humour, and he pointed out that at this time the head of the Secret Service was under growing strain, and criticism. There had been more losses recently – and leakages. There was fresh talk of traitors and betrayal and within Whitehall itself the ancient feud between the Secret Service and the Security Service was coming to a head. M.'s reaction to this sort of strain was always to be tougher – with others just as with himself. And Bond insists that M. was right. He had to be a hard man to hold down his job.
‘Too much sensitivity would have been quite out of place – no one in M.'s position could afford to be too understanding.’
I was surprised to find Bond even defending M. over the way he had to vent his disapproval by the enforced replacement of his favourite gun, the faithful old Beretta.
‘He could have been more tactful, but events proved him right – as usual.’ The new Walther PPK, so strongly recommended by the Armourer, has justified itself time and again. Bond says he owed his life to it, and that within a matter of weeks the Walther was as much a part of him as the Beretta had ever been: which was just as well once he was battling with Dr No.
The mission against Dr No (for all its hazards or perhaps because of them) brought James Bond back on form. It was the sort of mission in which he excelled. It seemed like a return to home ground to be back in Jamaica. Unlike the Turkish business with its atmosphere of constant double-dealing and betrayal, this offered Bond a chance to fight a clearcut enemy. Fleming has been permitted to describe the way that Bond tracked down the diabolical doctor to his guano-coated hideaway of Crab Key in the Caribbean. Thanks to James Bond he was destroyed, and with him the threat to American space programme from Cape Kennedy. But there was more to Bond's victory than that. Dr No was evil and Bond felt no remorse for the appalling death that finally befell him.
