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

by Matthew Parker

  Due to visit Goldeneye at the beginning of March were Ann’s father Guy Charteris and his second wife Violet, together with the artist Lucian Freud. Freud had painted Ann in 1950, portraying her with hard pursed red lips, a tiara on her head, with her chin jutting forward purposefully. ‘She asked me to one of those marvelous parties, semi-royal, quite a lot of them were,’ Freud later remembered. Ann had enjoyed showing off the young Wunderkind at her soirées.

  Ann and Ian went to meet them all at Kingston harbour, and made a trip of it, having dinner with the Foots at King’s House, and then spending a night with Charles and Mildred D’Costa, described by Ann in a letter to her brother as ‘rich influential Portuguese Jews’. (D’Costa provided the model for the Jamaican businessman lined up to vouch for Bond in Casino Royale.) Charles had been tutored in Jamaica by a young Cyril Connolly, who remembered him as ‘the world’s bloodiest boy … incredibly selfish, greedy and conceited’. The D’Costas had managed to secure special passes at the port for the Flemings and their guests and had offered to put them up for the night. According to Ann, breakfast at the D’Costas’ luxury house in Kingston consisted of ‘three black slaves’, ‘ebony black in starched shocking pink’ livery, arriving not with trays but a with a ‘vast mahogany table’ which they then spread with linen and silver. ‘The first course was exquisitely prepared grapefruit, pawpaw, pineapple slices and peeled banana; Ian grew very excited and said “a nabob’s breakfast” but alas, the silver coffee pot was half full and the scrambled eggs a grey mush.’ When they met the boat, Fleming had to go on board to vouch for Lucian Freud, who only had ten shillings with him.

  Ian disliked Freud intensely, partly because he wrongly suspected that he was having an affair with Ann. For Freud, the feeling was mutual; he described Fleming as ‘ghastly’. Ann’s friend Peter Quennell wrote to her from London imagining the scene: ‘Palms wave – waves ripple – tarantulas crawl – barracudas undulate … The Commander groans quietly under the horrors of his unwanted guests.’ Fortunately for Ian, he could always retreat inside to write.

  Freud spent a lot of his time at Goldeneye painting in a nearby banana grove: ‘I am still sitting in almost the same place and am now such a fixture there that birds sit on me and spiders use my head to hold up their new webs,’ he wrote. The result was a series of oil paintings that focus on the exotic lushness of the banana plant’s leaves and fruit. He did, however, accompany Ann and Ian on a mission to dig out author Graham Greene, who was staying with his mistress Lady Catherine Walston at the Tower Isle Hotel in Ocho Rios. Ann had ‘bombarded’ Greene with invitations with no success, but now they found the pair at Number One Bungalow at the hotel, and dry martinis and peanuts ensued. However, to Ann’s frustration, the ‘evening was totally ruined’ by the arrival of the boorish Lord Brownlow and a coterie of his friends.

  Meanwhile, Ann’s father Guy Charteris, a keen naturalist and birds’ egg collector, was loving Jamaica: ‘Papa is very happy and Vi a faithful sweating follower, he has found 50 birds and tomorrow we camp in the wilderness,’ wrote Ann to her brother. Guy kept a naturalist’s diary of his time at Goldeneye. He found the place ‘wonderful and bewildering’, noting the moths, the fireflies and the chorus of tree frogs. He was particularly taken with the rare Solitaire bird, with its outer tail feathers conspicuously tipped with white and its unhurried and flutelike song. Ian, of course, borrowed the name for his new heroine.

  The novel that emerged from this time on the island is possibly Fleming’s best. Certainly it is the book that establishes the winning formula. Live and Let Die is tightly plotted and well paced, with the end of each short chapter dragging the reader on to the next. Raymond Carver would call it ‘forceful and driving’. Fleming’s experiences of the Goldeneye reef provide inspiration for Bond’s first underwater sequence, superbly done. The book’s climactic scene is thriller writing of the highest order: Mr Big, inspired by Henry Morgan’s way of dealing with enemies, undertakes Bond’s destruction by dragging him and Solitaire behind a boat across the razor-sharp tropical reef.

  The story is framed by the Cold War and contains a nod to modern Jamaica with the mention of the strategic importance of bauxite. But with its lost pirate treasure, sharks and killer centipedes and black magic, it is really an old-fashioned Boy’s Own adventure story. One American reviewer would call it a ‘lurid meller contrived by mixing equal parts of Oppenheim and Spillane’. Fleming concedes this with his soon-to-be customary knowing looks to the reader: Bond describes his mission as an ‘adventure’; one villain looks ‘like the bad man in a film about poker-players and gold mines’; Bond’s Jamaica colleague Strangways, on hearing that the heroine needs rescuing, exclaims, ‘Sort of damsel in distress? Good show!’

  The villain is Mr Big, a ‘half negro and half French’ Harlem gangster and SMERSH operative with a grotesquely enormous head, whose skin is ‘grey-black, taut and shining like the face of a week-old corpse in the river’. Literally larger than life, he is the model for all the classic Bond villains – a ‘raving megalomaniac’ hoping ‘to ultimately win recognition in the history of our times’. Mr Big is smuggling seventeenth-century gold coins from Jamaica to the US to fund Soviet spy activities there and clearly make a lot of money for his organisation. The gold is from ‘one of the most valuable treasure troves in history’, belonging to ‘Bloody Morgan, the pirate’, the fruits, Fleming delights in mentioning, ‘of countless raids on Hispaniola, of the capture of innumerable treasure-ships sailing for The Plate, of the sacking of Panama and the looting of Maracaibo’.

  Mr Big runs a huge ‘black network’ in the United States and the Caribbean, keeping order through terror tactics. The heroine, Solitaire, is a white Haitian Creole beauty with ‘a face born to command. The face of the daughter of a French Colonial slave owner.’ Bond, betraying his weakness for romantic West Indian stereotypes, vividly imagines her past: ‘a lonely childhood on some great decaying plantation, an echoing “Great House” slowly falling into disrepair and being encouraged on by the luxuriance of the tropics’.

  Uniquely for the Bond novels, Live and Let Die contains supernatural elements. Solitaire says that Mr Big has ‘great psychic power’. He had been ‘initiated into Voodoo as a child’ and has ‘originated an underground Voodoo temple in Harlem’. Now he is the head of the Black Widow cult and believed by that cult to be the Zombie of Baron Samedi, ‘the most dreadful spirit in the whole of Voodooism’ – impossible to kill because he is dead already. Briefing Bond about the cult, M tells him that it will ‘frighten the daylights out of you’.

  Bond takes this seriously, reading up on Haitian voodoo in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree. When he is interrupted, ‘it took him minutes to forget the atmosphere, heavy with terror and the occult, that had surrounded him as he read’.

  Mr Big’s voodoo is shown to be a sham employed to keep local Jamaicans away from his island and to terrify his American black network into obedience. (François Duvalier, who became president of Haiti four years later, would also claim to be linked to Baron Samedi for similar motives.) However, in the case of the novel’s heroine, Solitaire, Fleming is more equivocal. Solitaire had been kept by Mr Big as he believes she has the power of telepathy, and can tell when one of his enemies is lying. As they flee south on the train, Bond asks her if she really does have ‘second sight’. ‘Yes, I have. Or something very like it,’ she replies. Though she criticises Haiti for being ‘riddled with Voodoo superstitions’, she also admits to her ‘half-belief in them’. For his part, Bond learns to respect ‘the extraordinary power of her intuitions’.

  In his 1947 Horizon article, Fleming had been dismissive: ‘Local black magic (obea) is scarce and dull but credited by most. It consists largely of brewing love potions and putting on hoodoos. If you find a white chicken with its head cut off lying on your doorstep you have, or should have, had it.’ But five years later, writing about Jamaica in the Spectator, he seems to have changed his mind, describing how, compared to European
s, black Jamaicans’ ‘extra-sensory perception, their sixth sense, is more highly developed’. Of course Fleming uses voodoo in the novel to impart a sense of exotic dread, what Solitaire describes as ‘the secret heart of the tropics, at the mercy of their anger and stealth and poison … the mystery of the drums… ‘ But at the same time, he had developed a surprising respect for these ‘dark’ practices and was fascinated by English occultist Aleister Crowley. He later wrote that he was ‘rather intrigued by fortune-telling and all matters connected with extra-sensory perception’.

  In Jamaica, belief in the supernatural, in obeah and ghosts, known locally as ‘duppies’, was widespread. Blanche Blackwell recounts several incidents where the spirits of dead people intervened in her life beneficially, on one occasion causing a car to stop in time to avoid a collapsed bridge. Her son Chris, as well as seeing the same Bellevue ghost as his mother, talks about Jamaica’s ‘strong feel of the supernatural in the air’. Even the firmly English Molly Huggins believed she had seen the ghost at Bellevue: ‘the shadowy form of a woman’ wearing ‘the tight-waisted dress of the Edwardians, full puffed sleeves and long skirts’.

  So the supernatural strain in Live and Let Die is a reflection of the atmosphere of Jamaica. But it is also shown to affect some people rather more than others. Bond declares that he has ‘read most of the books on Voodoo and I believe that it works’. But not on him, as he ‘stopped being afraid of the dark when I was a child and I’m not a good subject for suggestion or hypnotism’. Indeed, Solitaire fears the power of voodoo will be difficult to explain to someone like Bond, with such ‘certainty of spirit, with that background of common sense, brought up with clothes and shoes among the warm houses and the lighted streets’. In contrast, it is, Bond notes, ‘accepted through all the lower strata of the negro world … still deeply, primevally ingrained in the negro subconscious’.

  Whatever Fleming’s sympathies with and interest in the occult, in Live and Let Die it also functions to reflect his views on race. Writing in 1952 about black Jamaicans, he notes: ‘their physical strength is often undermined by weak nerves, and this makes them an easy prey to sickness or fear’. He balances this with what he would have thought was a compliment – ‘their organs of sight and hearing are keener than ours’ – but which ends up implying that black people are more ‘animal’ than whites, a racist cliché that goes back to the days of slavery. Solitaire at one point muses on ‘the sixth sense of fish, of birds, of negroes’.

  So in Live and Let Die, Mr Big’s henchmen are ‘clumsy black apes’. The villain himself has ‘animal eyes, not human’. Harlem, where the smell of ‘negro bodies’ is ‘feral’, is several times referred to as a ‘jungle’.

  The novel has none of what writer Simon Winder called ‘the crazily distasteful black-hands-on-white-flesh scenario’ of the 1973 film. But it still produces problems for modern or liberal readers and perhaps for anyone on whose behalf Bond has been adopted as a national icon. In 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the Black Panthers, attacked Bond as an example of a white ‘fantasy world’: ‘The “paper tiger” hero, James Bond, offered the whites a triumphant image of themselves, saying what many whites want desperately to be reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, Lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.’ Today, Ian’s niece Lucy Williams almost squirms in embarrassment when talking about the ‘obvious racism’ of Live and Let Die, in particular the naming of the Harlem chapter: ‘Nigger Heaven’. Fleming’s American publisher changed the chapter title to ‘Seventh Heaven’. Jonathan Cape kept it in, presumably assuming their readership would recognise it as the title of an anti-racist novel from the 1920s by Carl Van Vechten about the Harlem Renaissance.

  It is also important to note that Fleming – and Bond – looked down on pretty much everyone who was not British and perceived people of all colours in terms of negative stereotypes of race and nationality. In Moonraker, Bond comments on ‘the usual German chip on the shoulder’. The Japanese, Bond tells us in You Only Live Twice, have ‘an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible’. In Diamonds are Forever, he describes Italians as ‘bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent over themselves’. Afrikaners, we learn in the same book, are ‘a bastard race, sly, stupid and ill-bred’. In Dr No, the Chinese are ‘hysterical’. And so on, across every nationality Bond encounters. No villain in the Bond novels is ever British. Even when they are British citizens, such as Goldfinger or Moonraker’ s Sir Hugo Drax, they turn out to be of foreign racial origin. In a letter to Ann in 1956, having complained about Americans, Ian declared that ‘all foreigners are pestilential’.

  But with black Jamaicans and even black Americans, Fleming’s viewpoint seems slightly different. In fact, there is more affection towards these individuals in the novels than is offered towards almost any of the other non-British characters.

  When, in Live and Let Die, Bond and Leiter go uptown to Harlem to check out Mr Big’s home turf Bond feels they are ‘trespassing. They just weren’t wanted’, and he experiences the ‘same uneasiness of when he was operating behind enemy lines in the war’. He and Leiter receive contemptuous or hostile looks and several men spit in the gutter as they pass. Nonetheless, Leiter tells Bond: ‘Fortunately I like the negroes and they know it somehow … I admire the way they’re getting on in the world.’ His affection – albeit patronising – is based on music, the sort of jazz that Fleming was by now in the habit of buying in New York for his stepson Raymond. Leiter even uses this link to talk himself out of a severe beating later on.

  In his fourth novel, Diamonds are Forever, Fleming tells us that, like Leiter, ‘Bond had a natural affection for coloured people.’ For Fleming, it is a sign of a ‘good sort’. Just as shooting birds or hurting animals is a sure sign of villainy, if a character in a Bond novel is cruel to a black person, they can expect a prompt comeuppance. In Diamonds are Forever, the corrupt jockey Tingaling, ‘cocky’ and with a ‘sharp weasely face’, arrives at the Saratoga mud baths and addresses the black man working there with ‘Hey, you black bastard!’ before trying unsuccessfully to trip him up as he passes with a pail of mud. Tingaling gets his just rewards in the form of boiling mud on his head when hooded hitmen arrive who work for the diamond-smuggling Spang gangsters. One of the hoods, for no apparent reason, ‘lashed his revolver into the centre of the negro’s huge belly’. This then provides Bond with his motivation. ‘I’ve suddenly taken against the brothers Spang,’ he later tells Leiter. ‘I didn’t like those two men in hoods. The way the man hit that fat negro.’

  Despite feeling unwanted and out of place, Bond loves Harlem in Live and Let Die. He is ‘spellbound’ by the Savoy Ballroom: ‘He found many of the girls very beautiful. The music hammered its way into his pulse until he almost forgot what he was there for.’ Early on, he eavesdrops on a conversation between two young blacks, and tells Leiter that it ‘Seems they’re interested in much the same things as everyone else – sex, having fun … Thank God they’re not genteel about it.’ As with Coward’s Samolans, and Fleming’s Jamaicans asking directly ‘Will you do me a rudeness?’, Bond admires these characters’ lack of hypocrisy. As the night progresses, the music gets even louder, a stripper appears to the backing of voodoo drums and the air fills with the ‘sour sweet smell’ of marijuana. Bond loves the spontaneity, the physicality and what he would see as the sexy exoticism of it all. His affection is genuine, then, but based on what we would now see as racist clichés.

  Similarly, there are good intentions in the well-known passage near the beginning of Live and Let Die when Bond and M discuss the ‘progress of the negro race’.

  Bond, told by M that Mr Big is ‘probably the most powerful negro criminal in the world’, replies, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a great negro criminal before … plenty of negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don’t seem to take to big business. Pretty law-ab
iding chaps I should have thought except when they’ve drunk too much.’

  M, who can do no wrong in Fleming’s eyes, and is always described in terms of ‘remarkable’ and ‘shrewd’, continues: ‘The negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all there are 250,000,000 in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.’ Mr Big himself says almost exactly the same thing to Bond near the end of the novel: ‘In the history of negro emancipation there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in every other walk of life … It is unfortunate for you that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals.’

  Live and Let Die was reviewed by the Jamaica Gleaner when it came out in hardback the following year. The paper’s regular reviewer found it ‘a taut, exciting, intelligent and extremely sophisticated whodunnit’. But two years later, a paperback was picked up by George Panton, a black writer for the paper. Noting that Fleming’s house on the north coast ‘ranked high among the fabulous dwellings there’, but that he himself did not ‘in the normal course of events meet the glitter set from our Golden Coast’, he went on to express his dismay and disgust at the book, and in particular the exchange quoted above. ‘Surely one is not being over-sensitive at the implied condescension,’ he asked, before describing M’s comments as ‘provocative’. Not that these attitudes surprised him: ‘There is a special West Indian touch that many of us will find all too familiar,’ he wrote. So, for this reader, Fleming’s attempt at ‘affection’ misfires.