Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica

by Matthew Parker

  It all came out very fast, poured on to the page. Ann later commented that Ian ‘wasn’t very anxious to start, but once he’d begun, of course, he found himself enjoying it, and he finished the book in a great burst of enthusiasm’. This first novel was finished at the latest on 18 March, possibly even earlier, which meant an average of more than 2,000 words a day. Out of reach of the delicious cooling sea breeze, it must have become very hot inside shuttered Goldeneye. But the prospect of a refreshing dip in the bay would have been a great reward for a target reached – just another thousand words! Fleming later declared that the ‘main thing is to write fast and cursively in order to get narrative speed’. It was fatal to start criticising what you had just written, he advised. Instead, you just had to keep going. Awful bits could always be corrected later. (In fact, the manuscript of Casino Royale shows more subsequent changes than any other of his books.)

  Almost all the Bond books would be written at a similar rate, and sometimes it shows. For Casino Royale, however, Fleming clearly had key scenes well thought out before he sat down in front of his typewriter. The card game between Bond and Le Chiffre would remain, many books later, one of his finest creations. Le Chiffre is the secret paymaster of a communist-controlled union in north-west France, ‘an important fifth column in the event of war with Redland’. (It was a time when dissent in the unions and in the colonies was often blamed on ‘communist influence’.)

  But Le Chiffre has lost the union’s funds in a private venture and needs to recover the money promptly or face retribution from SMERSH, the ‘efficient organ of Soviet vengeance’. He has elected to do this by playing high-stakes baccarat. To prevent him winning, and thereby cause his destruction, M, the head of the British Secret Service, sends his organisation’s best card player, James Bond, to take him on at the casino of Royale-les-Eaux, a high-end resort on the French Channel coast. Bond is to be supported by a French agent, Mathis, as well as by the CIA.

  Bond’s cover in France is as a ‘Jamaican plantocrat whose father had made his pile in tobacco and sugar and whose son chose to play it away on the stock markets and casinos’. He signs his name in the hotel register as ‘James Bond, Port Maria, Jamaica’. He is also to be controlled from the island, receiving instructions via a ‘taciturn man who was head of the picture desk on the Daily Gleaner, the famous newspaper of the Caribbean’. A friend of Bond’s from Jamaica, ‘Charles DaSilva of Chaffery’s, Kingston’, has agreed to pretend to be his attorney, ‘if inquiries were made’.

  It is assumed by the Frenchman Mathis that part of Bond’s Jamaican cover should be ‘hot blood’ (a persistent stereotype of West Indian Creoles) and thus the companionship of an attractive escort. What is more natural than that you should pick up a pretty girl here?’ he asks. As a Jamaican millionaire what with your hot blood and all, you would look naked without one.’ Enter Vesper Lynd, named after the drink Fleming had enjoyed at the strange Great House at Duncans. Vesper is assistant to the head of Station S (Soviet Union), and Bond, although preferring to work alone, is immediately ‘intrigued by her composure’ and ‘excited by her beauty’ – particularly her ‘fine breasts’.

  In spite of all precautions, Bond’s cover is already blown. His hotel room is bugged, and he must survive an assassination attempt by a pair of Bulgarians (‘“They’re stupid, but obedient. The Russians use them for simple killings’”), as well as a gun in his back during the game itself.

  Nonetheless, he takes on Le Chiffre, who watches him during the game ‘like an octopus under a rock’. Afterwards, Vesper is kidnapped and Bond himself is captured trying to rescue her. In one of Fleming’s most explicit scenes, Bond is then tortured by having his testicles beaten. He survives to consummate his flirtation with Vesper, but is left at the end with a desire for vengeance against SMERSH, and a broken heart belied by the savage last line of the book: ‘The bitch is dead now.’ (We learn in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, written ten years later, that he still makes an annual pilgrimage to Royale-les-Eaux to visit Vesper’s grave.) With heartbreak and vengeful anger fuelling the tank, James Bond is launched.

  The Bond who emerges from Fleming’s first take on his hero is at once old-fashioned and modern, austere and decadent. He is highly professional and expert, but an aficionado of sensual enjoyment, taking ‘a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink’. His name, anonymous and sleek, differentiates him from his Clubland Hero predecessors, all the Carruthers, Berties and Algernons, though he, like them, thinks and talks in sporting analogies such as ‘bowled out’. When, years later, Fleming was asked about the influence of Buchan and Bulldog Drummond, he declared that ‘the old days of the hero getting a crack over the head with a cricket stump have rather gone out’. It was ‘ridiculous’, he said, to go on writing thrillers in the old way ‘when life has come on so fast beside us’. But in Casino Royale, Bond very nearly meets his nemesis from a gun hidden inside a walking stick, which is not so far removed from the cricket stump.

  Kingsley Amis said that Bond wasn’t an aristocrat because he didn’t drink port or sherry. Neither are his vodka martinis a pint down the pub. Bond doesn’t hunt or sail, but he’s also uninterested in a working-class sport like football. His are the consumer sports – skiing, golf, gambling – open only to those with money but relatively free of old class assumptions.

  Like the sunseekers of Jamaica’s ‘Gold Coast’, Bond moves in spaces that are rich, for sure, but becoming increasingly classless. Outnumbering the lords and maharajas at the casino table in Royale are a Belgian who has made a fortune in colonial Congo, a Greek shipowner, sundry rich Americans, including a flaky film star, and a young Italian ‘who had probably had plenty of money from rackrents in Milan’. It is the newjet-set, classless, always abroad, detached from where they are, feeding their appetites. It is Bond’s milieu: he is a new hero for the jet age.

  Detachment is an important part of Bond’s charm. His power and charisma come from his combination of style and isolation; he treats women with ‘a mixture of taciturnity and passion’. His character has coldness, cynicism and ruthlessness, but he is constantly trying to control and conceal his emotions and suppress his appetites. Mathis says, ‘I don’t think Bond has ever been melted.’ But Fleming reveals of his hero that, ‘like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment’.

  Above all, though, Bond is soaked in a disconcerting psychological unease, his face ‘ironical, brutal and cold’. Like Fleming, he enjoys staring out to sea, ‘lost in his thoughts’.

  Like Fleming also, Bond loves cars, and smokes Morland cigarettes in the same quantity – ‘Bond lit his seventieth cigarette of the day.’ He also matches Fleming’s own prodigious alcohol consumption, although without the attendant health problems beginning to bother his creator. Peter Quennell reckoned that James Bond incorporated Fleming’s ‘passion for speed, his taste for mechanical devices, his masculine hedonism and restless energy’.

  Aside from the character of the hero, other distinctive elements of the Bond novels to come are laid out in Casino Royale for the first time. The villain is of mixed race, ‘probably a mixture of Mediterranean with Prussian or Polish strains’, as they almost all would be. Le Chiffre, like many of Bond’s adversaries, is also physically unusual and repulsive, with overlarge false teeth and ear lobes, and moist yellowish skin, a ‘flagellant’ with a ‘large sexual appetite’.

  Then there are the detailed, lip-smacking descriptions of conspicuous luxury consumption and lifestyle – cars, hotels, wine and food, including caviar, lobster and foie gras. We learn about Bond’s special self-authored cocktail: ‘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.’ The bar staff are honoured to follow these expert instructions; then Bond helpfully advises that grain-based rather than potato-based vodka would make the recipe better. For 1953’s rationed and skinflint Austerity Britain, this was pure delicious escapism, just as Fleming
’s sojourns in Jamaica were for him.

  But while Casino Royale launches a recognisable Bond, and a recognisable style, it remains somehow different from the rest of the novels. It is at times clunky in its exposition, and has an unsatisfactory structure, with an overlong coda after the gruesome climax of the action. But it also has a claustrophobic tension not experienced again until the much later books. It is rawer and less polished than later Bond novels, as perhaps we should expect of a first attempt, but at the same time it seems more nuanced and subtle than much of what would follow. (For Raymond Carver, it would remain the best Bond novel.)

  The shadow of the real-life Burgess-Maclean treachery that hangs over Casino Royale makes it perhaps the closest Fleming came to a Le Carré-style spy story. The plot addresses the disastrous infiltration of MI5, with the twist in the tail being the exposure of a mole at the heart of the Secret Service’s Station S. We also have the American view on the newly revealed unreliability of the British Secret Service. When Bond meets Felix Leiter for the first time, he senses a certain reserve behind the American agent’s charm: ‘Although he seemed to talk quite openly about his duties in Paris, Bond soon noticed that he never spoke of his American colleagues in Europe or in Washington and he guessed that Leiter held the interests of his own organization far above the mutual concern of the North Atlantic Allies. Bond sympathized with him.’

  More widely, Casino Royale tries to reflect these changed times of diminished British power. Bond needs to be bailed out by Leiter, his CIA contact, when the gambling goes astray. Leiter slips him an envelope containing thirty-two million francs, labelled ‘Marshall Aid’. Bond is able to return the money later, but comments, ‘That envelope was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me … talk about a friend in need.’ Similarly, Bond is in fact saved by a Russian đeus ex machina, rather than by his own efforts (as would almost always be the case in later books).

  But however diminished the status of Britain, and its intelligence services, Casino Royale still depicts Britain in general and Bond in particular as being in the front line of the Cold War against the Russians, just as Buchan’s Richard Hannay had once been against the Germans. Even though the action takes place in France, French operative Mathis is clearly subservient to Bond. The American Felix Leiter is also ‘under the orders’ of the British. As Leiter confides, Washington’s pretty sick we’re not running the show . . .’

  Felix Leiter is a combination of two of Ian’s friends. Felix was Ivar Bryce’s middle name, and Leiter came from Tommy Leiter, a mutual friend from a rich Chicago family. Tommy was a hopeless drunk, but his wife Marion, known as ‘Oatsie’, was a spirited Southern lady who struck up a strong and lasting friendship with Ian that would have important consequences. The Leiters had a house in Jamaica at Reading, in the hills overlooking Montego Bay, near the Stephensons.

  Leiter appeared as Bond’s American sidekick in five of the novels, and would be played, somewhat confusingly, by eight different actors in the later Bond films. His close and friendly relationship with Bond represents an optimistic, or even fantastic, model for Britain’s relationship with the United States. Leiter’s role is to supply Bond with technical support, hardware and muscle, as well as money. Bond – and by implication Britain – provides the leadership, intelligence and daring.

  But as he recovers from his torture, Bond experiences a minicrisis, complaining that ‘History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing places.’ We are fighting communism, he tells Mathis, but fifty years ago the ‘brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that’. He even goes as far as to pronounce: ‘this country right or wrong business is getting a little out of date’, a subversive doubt never expressed by Bond again.

  But it is only a brief glimpse into the Le Carré-ish world of complicated disloyalties and the Cambridge spies. Although the plot is about a traitor in the British Secret Service, there is nothing political or ambiguous about Vesper’s motives for betraying her country. Instead she is trapped by love and by the sheer nastiness of the opposition, who have tortured her Polish lover – an RAF wartime hero – and threatened him with retribution if she does not cooperate.

  Le Chiffre himself, because of his extreme cruelty, simplifies the murky moral landscape of the Cold War (so different to the certainties of Britain’s fight in the Second World War), and thereby resolves Bond’s doubts about his career, as he explains: Le Chiffre ‘was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose,’ Bond concludes. ‘By his evil existence … he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist’. It’s a manifesto for the Bond villain figure, who would become over time far more outlandish and extreme, and therefore fulfil the ‘vital purpose’ of clarifying right from wrong even more effectively. So although Casino Royale has a moral landscape with more ‘grey areas’ than any other Bond book, it ultimately hopes to reassure its British readers about their country’s rectitude as well as its status and role in the world.

  In spite of Ian’s writing, and Ann’s pregnancy, their involvement in the burgeoning north-coast social life continued. On 27 February there was another cocktail party at Sir Harold and Lady Mitchell’s Prospect Great House in Ocho Rios, ‘one of the highlights of the north coast season’, as the Gleaner reported. Lady Mitchell, ‘in vivid red, was a busy hostess’, welcoming among her guests Ann (‘wearing a cream creation’) and Ian, the Brownlows, Lord and Lady Graham and Lord and Lady Mansfield. The last, the paper continued, ‘in strawberry pink was obviously delighted to be back in Jamaica … Guests had a glimpse of the garden, gay with roses, scarlet salvias and hibiscuses of every shade. Bowls of flowers gilded the rooms, blending easily with the old cedar paneling.’

  When not partying, Ann and Ian were ‘asleep by 10.30 and bathing at sunrise, writing, painting, shooting, eating and snoozing for the rest for the day’, as Ann wrote to her brother Hugo ‘from the Lotus Islands’. ‘It is frighteningly agreeable.’ Ian described it as ‘a marvelous honeymoon among the hummingbirds and barracudas’.

  Ann’s divorce became absolute on Monday 24 March. She and Ian married the same day at Port Maria town hall. There were only two witnesses: Noël Coward, and his secretary Cole Lesley. Coward had warned Violet, ‘I shall wear long elbow gloves and give the bride away. I may even cry a little at the sheer beauty of it all.’ In fact, according to Lesley, ‘We took our duties very seriously; wore ties (unheard of for Noël in Jamaica) with formal white suits, our pockets full of rice, and got to the Town Hall early. We attracted a crowd of six and a smiling though toothless black crone who entertained us with some extremely improper calypsos, including one called “Belly Lick”.’ (Lyrics include the line: ‘Drop your pants and lie down’. Fleming refers to the song in his Jamaica novel, The Man with the Golden Gun.)

  Coward, who saw himself as the matchmaker, having assisted during Ann’s previous adulterous trips to Jamaica, remembered Ann and Ian at their wedding as ‘surprisingly timorous’. Fleming wore his usual nautical belted blue linen shirt with blue trousers. Ann, four months pregnant and beginning to show, was in a silk dress copied from a Dior design by a local Port Maria seamstress. Coward noticed that she was shaking so much the dress fluttered. ‘It was an entirely hysterical affair,’ he later wrote.

  Inside the parochial office, the first thing they all saw was ‘an enormous oleograph of Churchill scowling down on us with bulldog hatred’. Once married by the registrar, Mr L. A. Robinson, they headed for Blue Harbour for strong martinis, then back to Goldeneye for a special wedding supper prepared by Violet. Coward remembered it as particularly bad: the black crab, which ‘can be wonderful to eat if you have a good cook, but Ian didn’t have a good cook’, ‘tasted just like eating cigarette ash’. To make things worse, Violet then brought out ‘a slimy green wedding cake, and dusky heads peered round the door to make sure we ate it. Ian had to because he
was directly in line of sight, but later we took the cake outside and buried it so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings.’ The evening ended with a punch of Fleming’s own creation – white rum poured on citrus peel then ignited.

  The next day, the newly-weds motored to Montego Bay to stay a night at Sunset Lodge before flying to Nassau, then on to New York.

  Heavily pushed by Ian’s brother Peter and his friend William Plomer, the finished manuscript for Casino Royale was accepted for publication by Jonathan Cape, for whom Plomer worked as a scout. Ian had wanted to dedicate the book to Ann, but she replied, ‘Surely one doesn’t dedicate books of this sort to people.’ The space for the dedication remained empty.

  On 12 August, Ann gave birth, after a difficult Caesarean, to a 91b 4oz baby boy, Caspar. She spent the next two weeks in hospital, with ‘tubes performing every physical function’. Her doctors advised her to have no more babies, ‘rather strongly, which is depressing’. You have been wonderfully brave and I am very proud of you,’ Ian wrote to her. ‘I do hope darling Caspar has made it up to you a little. He is the most heavenly child and I know he will grow up to be something wonderful because you have paid for him with so much pain. Goodnight my brave sweetheart.’ A month later, Ann was still having nightmares about long red rubber tubes, and was weeping continuously.

  Cedi Beaton’s photograph of Ian and Ann with their new arrival, Caspar.

  Caspar’s godparents were to be Cecil Beaton, Anthony Eden’s wife Clarissa (a close friend of Ann’s), Ian’s brother Peter, and Noël Coward. Ann explained in a letter to a friend that they thought Noël would be offended if not asked, ‘as he considers himself responsible for the whole thing’. She soon regretted it, writing to Beaton in September about a visit from Coward: ‘He was quite delightful for the first hour … and then he suddenly became so vulgar and dull that I longed to cancel the G-parent arrangement and be frightfully rude to him; my only false relationships are with him and Rosamond Lehmann and I cannot extricate myself from either.’