Bond triumphs over Drax, of course, but what results is a huge cover-up of the whole episode. ‘What’s the alternative? … War with Russia? Lots of people on both sides of the Atlantic would be only too glad of an excuse,’ says M, worried about the current bellicosity of the Americans. In the summer of the previous year, Fleming had been in the United States and had found, seemingly, the whole country, led by Senator Joe McCarthy, obsessed by ‘anti-American activities’. In November 1953, in one of his first columns for the Sunday Times’ Atticus, Fleming had written that this ‘prairie fire of fear, intolerance and hatred [and] atmosphere of purge and persecution’ were ridiculous. There is even a suggestion that the Cold War had made the United States as dangerous as the Soviet Union. For his next novel, Diamonds are Forever, Fleming would step back from both the apocalyptic threat of Moonraker and from the Cold War.
Unlike all the other 1950s Bond novels, the villains of Diamonds are Forever are not working directly or indirectly for the Soviets, as Bond acknowledges: ‘What’s [M] so worried about?’ he asks. ‘It’s not as if this was Iron Curtain business.’
Instead, Bond’s mission is a rather grubby one. Diamond smuggling from the British colony of Sierra Leone is causing a fall in income for the Treasury in London. M outlines the issue: ‘Seems that most of what they call “gem” diamonds are mined on British territory and that ninety per cent of all diamond sales are carried out in London.’ It’s the ‘biggest dollar-earner we’ve got. So when something goes wrong with it, the Government gets worried.’ So Bond is sent, effectively, on an economic mission for hard-pressed Britain, a need Fleming acknowledges when he writes in his Spectator article that ‘we cannot afford to eat forever on borrowed money’. M seems almost embarrassed by the profit extracted by his country, telling Bond: ‘Don’t ask me why. The British got hold of the business at the beginning of the century and we’ve managed to hold on to it.’ The unspoken coda is ‘for now’. By 1955, Sierra Leone was well on the way to self-government and independence. By the time Fleming was writing Diamonds are Forever, there was nothing ‘forever’ about the Empire in Africa (the Gold Coast would lead the way, achieving independence as Ghana in 1957).
There is also an implication in M’s comment that Britain has no real right to these riches. In The Diamond Smugglers, a collection of essays for the Sunday Times that would be published as a book in 1957, Fleming is similarly shamefaced at the situation in Sierra Leone, describing the colony as underfinanced and ‘pretty near the bottom of the pile’ of British priorities. The British local expert he interviews even declares that ‘One’s almost ashamed of it being an English possession.’ The root of the problem of smuggling, he explains, is ‘the general idea among the illicit miners that the soil of Sierra Leone belongs to the Sierra Leoneans’.
There’s nothing so subversive in the novel itself; but the plot does highlight Britain’s parlous economic situation, and the lack of sympathy forthcoming from the United States, where the smuggled diamonds are being sold. For the Americans, this is only a very small part of the fight against the Mafia, so the FBI, M confirms, ‘won’t be much help to us, I’m afraid’. Moreover, M doesn’t want to hand the case over to the FBI and have the Americans ‘pick Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire’.
Bond’s journey to the US, as he infiltrates the diamond smuggling pipeline, gives Fleming the chance for plenty more sneering about America and Americans. Local smoked salmon is ‘a poor substitute for the product of Scotland’. The scenery around Las Vegas is ‘a blasted Martian landscape’ where the heat ‘hit Bond’s face like a fist’ (the heat in Jamaica, in contrast, is described as ‘sticky fingers’ that ‘brush Bond’s face’). The mountains, unlike Jamaica’s ‘soft green’, are ‘streaked with red like gums bleeding over rotten teeth’. (Recovering from a beating at the hands – or, more exactly, feet – of Spang’s heavies, Bond wishfully dreams he is back in Jamaica.) The strip is ‘ghastly glitter’. And Leiter, conveniently now privately employed by Pinkerton’s detective agency so he can help Bond without official involvement, tells him that the country is utterly crime-ridden: ‘Now the hoodlums don’t run liquor. They run governments. State governments like Nevada.’ The villains have protection from corrupt politicians and officials in Washington. Once again, it takes Englishman Bond to sort it all out: ‘Maybe you can strike a blow for Freedom, Home and Beauty with that old rusty equalizer of yours,’ says Leiter. Bond has no respect for American gangsters, ‘only contempt and dislike’, and feels huge relief when he boards the Queen Elizabeth, the (actually much-subsidised) symbol of British maritime excellence, and ‘the great safe black British belly’ of the ship.
There are some excellent set pieces in Diamonds Are Forever – the drive-in, the mud-baths, the racetrack at Saratoga (where Bond appreciates ‘the extra exotic touch of the negroes’), but the story misses the crazy central megalomania of the villains of the previous two books. The ‘knowing looks’ to the reader – ‘He had been a stage-gangster, surrounded by stage properties’; ‘Mike Hammer routine. These American gangsters were too obvious’; ‘That was quite an exit. Like something out of an old Buster Keaton film’ – feel more tired than arch. ‘For Bond it was just the end of another adventure,’ Fleming concludes, his weariness palpable.
Fleming would later explain his annual cycle of writing in Jamaica, editing and checking proofs in England in the spring and then, in the autumn, beginning the hunt for ideas for the next book. For him, this was the most difficult, often ‘heart-sinking’ moment. After Diamonds are Forever, he felt wiped out, writing to his friend Hilary Bray: ‘I baked a fresh cake in Jamaica this year which I think has finally exhausted my inventiveness as it contains every single method of escape and every variety of suspenseful action that I had omitted from my previous books – in fact everything except the kitchen sink, and if you can think up a good plot involving kitchen sinks, please send it along speedily.’ Peter Quennell, who was in Jamaica for the creation of the last two novels, believed that, ‘As early as 1955 [Ian] was already growing tired of Bond.’
Meanwhile, Moonraker had been published to a number of good reviews, the New Statesman commenting: ‘Mr Fleming is splendid, he stops at nothing.’ In the Spectator, John Metcalfe wrote: ‘It is utterly disgraceful – and highly enjoyable,’ but also said that it was not Fleming’s best. The TLS called it a ‘disappointment’. Diamonds are Forever had a similarly mixed reception when it was published in April 1956; the ability of the British Fleming to write convincingly about America was much praised, but the TLS called it Fleming’s ‘weakest book, a heavily padded story’. By then Fleming had completed his next novel to first draft and was seriously considering killing off his hero.
Apart from the somewhat guilty colonial exploitation and the ‘therapeutic anti-Americanism’, perhaps what is most interesting about Diamonds are Forever is the love interest, Tiffany Chase.
She is gorgeous, of course, her ‘brazen sexiness’ introduced when Bond first sees her, sitting half naked astride a chair like the famous Keeler picture taken by Lewis Morley seven years later. It gets better when Bond discovers she is an accomplished card sharp and a heavy drinker and smoker – abstinence, like that of Rufus B. Saye in this novel, is a sure sign of villainy in the Fleming universe. She and Bond seem made for each other.
The book ends with a long coda aboard the Queen Elizabeth that is more than anything a discussion of marriage. Earlier Bond had felt ‘they had all the time in the world’ (a favourite expression of Fleming’s that is also used during the torture scene with Le Chiffre), and that ‘they both knew the answer to the big question’. By the end of the novel, ‘Bond knew that he was very close to being in love with her’.
But Bond’s bachelordom is, in the end, unassailable. He says he can handle life better on his own and tells Tiffany that marriage subtracts rather than adds to two people. He doesn’t want to be in the role of ‘healer’, dealing with a ‘patient’. If he married, it would involve the horror of ‘handi
ng round canapés in an L-shaped drawing-room. And there’d be all those ghastly ‘Yes, you did – no I didn’t” rows that seem to go with marriage. It wouldn’t last. I’d get claustrophobia and run out.’ After that, he changes the subject. It’s hard not to wonder what Ann made of this, although she claimed not to have read the book.
The troubles of their marriage had a lot to do with the self-centred personalities of both Ann and Ian, which made them, as Noël Coward had accurately predicted, unsuitable for matrimony and monogamy, but also with Goldeneye – Ian’s bachelor space – and with Bond. Ann originally thought she had married a newspaperman, as she done before, but now found herself partnered to a popular genre novelist. Ian had written to Ivar Bryce in late 1954: ‘Live and Let Die has the wind under its tail and Annie is horrified that I may be becoming famous which has upset all her calculations.’ For Ann, Bond was an embarrassment. To her friends, she now referred to Ian’s books as ‘horror comics’ and ‘pornography’. In public she would decry ‘these dreadful Bond books’.
When Coward read Moonraker, he noted in his diary: ‘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.’
Ian’s patience with Ann’s circle, so often packed round the dining table at their Victoria Square house, was now running out. Peter Quennell remembered one occasion at dinner where ‘the Commander was suffering greatly’ sitting next to a duchess. Quennell noted him looking ‘very Bond-ish, his handsome Aztec mask deeply scored with lines of pain, weariness and disgust’. Now Fleming much preferred going out to his club to play bridge in the evenings. But it was impossible when he returned home to avoid the ‘gab-fest’, as to get to his bedroom he had to go through the crowded dining room. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that he came back one night to hear Ann’s friends mockingly reading aloud from Live and Let Die.
In the summer of 1954, Ann and Ian had separate holidays – Ian with the Bryces in Vermont, Ann with Fionn in Greece to stay with Patrick Leigh Fermor and his wife. The winter trip to Goldeneye, previously the scene of their happiest times together, now caused rows. Ann wanted to take Caspar, but Ian would not hear of it, arguing somewhat unconvincingly that it was far too dangerous for a two-year-old.
Ann acquiesced, but then insisted that they travel separately so that an accident, such as occurred to a BOAC Stratocruiser just before Christmas 1954, in which twenty-eight people died, would not leave Caspar an orphan. The result was that Ann arrived after Ian and, deciding to get a boat home, left two weeks before him.
While Ian’s love for Jamaica was entirely undiminished, for Ann the novelty seems to have worn off. Her letters that year show she left England ‘with great reluctance’ and was missing Caspar.
This year also saw them meeting and getting to know the Gleaner columnist Morris Cargill. He became a close friend of Ian, and would appear as a Gleaner journalist in Dr No and as a Justice of the Supreme Court in The Man with the Golden Gun. Cargill described Fleming as ‘a very interesting man. A very nice man.’ Ann was ‘highly intelligent and beautiful, but very strange. She loved men but disliked other women intensely.’ The Fleming marriage, said Cargill, was ‘armed neutrality’. Fleming told his new friend that ‘he felt totally trapped by the whole thing’.
To keep her company while Ian was, as Ann put it, ‘polishing up horror comic number four’ – Diamonds are Forever – Evelyn Waugh and Peter Quennell came to stay at Goldeneye. Quennell came first and was his usual mellow and accommodating self, ‘a peaceful and appreciative guest’, alternating ‘pursuing humming-birds’ with correcting his latest proofs.
Waugh’s mother had died in December 1954, and friends recommended he go somewhere warm to get over it. He stayed first with the Brownlows for two weeks but found it, he later told Ann, ‘a great intellectual strain to find words simple enough to converse with them – they are indeed a grisly household, gin from ten-thirty on’. Perry Brownlow had ‘troubles’ and drank far too much whisky, Waugh reported. ‘The women concentrate on a smooth sunburn and hairless bronzed shanks, the men lounge and yawn or play cards … There was a lady here went to sleep on a mattress in a red bathing dress and all the vultures thought she was dead and bloody and tried to eat her.’
Waugh sought early refuge with the Flemings, which he much preferred, writing to Ann afterwards: ‘Goldeneye was delightful, I should not have believed that a modern house could be so congenial.’ He and Quennell reportedly ‘hated each other’, but here they were forced to put aside their differences. On one occasion they both went rafting on the Rio Grande with Ann, while Ian pressed on with his writing. ‘Evelyn wore blue silk pyjamas and a pink-ribboned Panama hat,’ Ann wrote to Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘He ordered a stupendous lunch from the Titchfield Hotel – wine packed in ice in biscuit tins, cold roast fowls and legions of hard boiled eggs – he treated Peter as a native bearer and we rode ahead on the first raft, Peter and the biscuit tins behind us; whenever we shot a tiny rapid he roared over his shoulder “Stop looking so poetical and mind the lunch” but alas it was Peter’s victory for the river was in spate, our punter inexperienced for he lost balance and fell overboard, we cannoned into the rocks and subsided slowly into the river – Peter said it was like watching an old-fashioned carriage accident … We swam for the shore, Evelyn doing a slow breaststroke, blue eyes blazing and mood much improved, for he liked things to go wrong.’
Waugh struggled with the snorkelling, and according to Quennell was ‘entirely unappreciative of nature’: ‘I have watched him, a cigar in his mouth and a large straw hat crammed on his angry head, wearing a striped suit that increased his resemblance to a rich plantation owner of the last century, stumping ponderously along a Caribbean beach without a glance for the spectacle of sky and sea, despite the humming birds that played through the hedge or the liquid aquamarine of glassy wavelets that slid up against the blanched sand.’
Waugh was also unusual among Goldeneye guests in noticing, or more exactly commenting on, Jamaica beyond the beauties of sea and garden. ‘Jamaica is an odd island,’ he wrote in a letter to his son, Bron. ‘The whole north coast has quite lately become the resort of millionaires, mostly American. Ten years ago the coast was an empty coral strand with a few negro fishing villages. Now it is all Hollywood style villas and huge hotels charging 40 dollars a day for their smallest rooms and the poor negroes cannot find a yard of beach to paddle in … Land on the coast which ten years ago could be bought for £20 an acre now costs £2,000. Great fortunes have been made in land speculation but no benefit goes to the people. Perhaps they will massacre the whites one day. At present they seem too lethargic.’
Waugh was prone to hyperbole in his letters, but it is still an arresting statement. For his part, the Governor, Sir Hugh Foot, remained vigilant against what he saw as the communist threat. Labour leaders suspected of communist links were harassed and arrested. ‘The Moscow Trojan horse has arrived in Jamaica,’ he declared in 1954. ‘It is foreign to every good tradition which has grown up in the island … it depends on foreign money.’ In fact, the entire Latin America region occupied the last place in the Soviet leadership’s system of priorities. Small amounts of money were, in the late fifties, passed by the KGB to communist parties in South America, but the Caribbean was ignored. In the event, Foot’s personal friendship with and respect for the Manleys, Norman and Edna, and the previous purging of the PNP made him relaxed about the expected victory of Manley’s party in the election of January 1955.
Those expelled from the PNP in 1952 had founded their own party, the National Labour Party, and ran three candidates in the 1955 election. Also running was the new Farmers’ Party, established by Robert Kirkwood to represent the interests of the landowning class. Neither won a seat at the e
lection, in which the PNP garnered over 50 per cent of the vote and achieved a majority over Bustamante’s JLP for the first time.
Manley’s victory triggered huge celebrations. ‘Massive crowds jammed Duke Street,’ Edna wrote in her diary. ‘People climbed trees, clung to fences.’ A ‘huge emotional throng’ sang the rousing lines of ‘Jamaica Arise’. (‘The trumpet has sounded … so awake from your slumber…’)
Norman Manley’s speech on winning showed a new leader desperate to look and move forward, unlike some of Jamaica’s white semi-residents. ‘I am now stripped of the rancor or remembrance of hurt in the past,’ he declared, ‘and offer to one and all to go forward from here for a better Jamaica.’
There were, indeed, grounds for hope that Jamaica’s appalling poverty and inequality might at last be surmountable. It was an optimistic time. Both major parties supported the establishment of the West Indies Federation, the fast-track to dominion status. Bauxite mining had started in earnest in 1952, even if its extraction was in the hands of North American companies. Manley renegotiated the contracts so Jamaica got a bigger royalty from the money made by the foreign companies. As a result, by 1957 it was one of the country’s biggest foreign exchange earners.
Sugar had revived a little, driven in part by the activities of Tate & Lyle. Although Manley was amongst those concerned that tourism would ‘spoil’ Jamaica and Jamaicans, the business was expanding rapidly, and the mass emigration of Jamaicans to Britain, which had risen from 2,000 in 1952 to nearly 20,000 in 1955, was now bringing in hefty remittances. The new government also set about land reform, founded the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, widened the intake of children to the best schools and centrally planned industrial development.
Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica Page 18
