The Man with the Golden Typewriter

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  (5th gin and tonic and goodnight my darling love and come if you possibly can) I love you only in the world.

  TO ANN

  Goldeneye, Jamaica, Saturday [11 February 1956]

  My darling Treasure,

  Truman Capote has come to stay. Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me? On the heels of a telegram he came bustling and twittering along with his tiny face crushed under a Russian Commissar’s uniform hat. I told you he had just arrived from Moscow. Anyway it appears he couldn’t stand the Round Hill life with the Paleys and Minnie and Co and just came to me to be saved and write his articles for the New Yorker. Anyway here he is till Tuesday and of course he’s a fascinating character and we really get on very well though when I gave him a lobster without a head to carry this morning I thought we were going to have another Rosamund act.4 But he was brave and went off with it at arm’s length. It has poured with rain since he arrived on Thursday and is still crashing down. Just taking him off to Noël for drinks and dinner. Ah me. Anyway the book is half done and buzzing along merrily in the rain.It is now Sunday and I’m in the garden between showers and spells of hot sun. The Noël evening was typical. His Firefly house is a near-disaster and anyway the rain pours into it from every angle and even through the stone walls so that the rooms are running with damp. He is by way of living alone up there and Coley5 has to spend half his time running up and down in the car with ice and hot dishes of quiche Lorraine! A crazy set-up. N. is going to sell Goldenhurst and Gerald Street and become a Bermuda citizen! So as to save up money for his old age. I can see the point but I expect the papers will say some harsh things.

  Write again quickly. Your letters are wonderful and long.

  I love you,

  Ian

  Truman and everyone send their love.

  FROM WILLIAM PLOMER

  Sunday 1st July, 56

  My dear Ian,

  I’ve just finished From R. with L., and hasten to say that I’ve greatly enjoyed it & all your verbal inventiveness. V.g. beginning, & Red Grant & Rosa Klebb are outstanding in your lengthening gallery of monsters. I thought the planning in Moscow more thorough than suspenseful, but with a nicely knowledgeable air. All the Istanbul part & return journey the greatest fun. A fight “to the death” between two naked gipsy girls very Ianesque: I felt a mixture of relief & disappointment that it wasn’t quite to the death. The periscope a great lark, but not madly credible. Excellent use made of Orient express & I particularly like the conclusion, with its to-be-continued-in-our-next air. A master-stroke to leave Bond not cock-a-hoop but wounded & unconscious & the reader in suspense. I thought Tatiana very well & quickly trained, & was struck by the contrast between her early nervousness & diffidence and her self-possession when on the job.

  I have gone through the typescript with a fine-toothed lead pencil & corrected or queried a good many points of spelling, punctuation, mis-typing, &c. And I enclose a list of details, some of which may be helpful.

  This letter comes

  From William,

  With congratulations

  also with thanks for the pleasure of reading the story & all best wishes for its success. Klebb is in the basket, & I hope Success is in the bag!

  [PS] I thought the mouth of Marilyn Monroe business v.g. & v. cinematic.

  [PPS] “J’aime les sensations fortes” would make just the right epigraph to your collected works!

  FROM DANIEL GEORGE, ESQ., 18 East Heath Road, Hampstead, N.W.5.

  6.7.56

  Dear Ian,

  I took your typescript home last night but as I’d had to attend a dinner of the Society of Bookmen I wasn’t able to spend much time with it – enough, though, to be delighted by your opening chapter and the promised developments. The PEN Congress will make me almost incommunicado during next week, but in the week beginning July 16th I shall be available to discuss the book with you. Meanwhile I’d like to know how much you can stand in the way of minute criticism of your style. In a story of this kind pace and sharpness of impression are essential; every word must count; every statement must be direct; no simile must be distracting. I went over the first chapter again early this morning and have indicated in pencil the points I suggest you ought to consider. For some examples: too many of your sentences begin with or include the words ‘there was’. Now it is always better to say ‘A man was at the door’ than ‘There was a man at the door.’ Similarly, it is desirable to avoid, wherever possible, ‘the,’ ‘after that,’ ‘but.’ Similes should be used only when they are helpful. I haven’t the typescript before me, but in the first chapter, I think, you say the man’s eyelids twitched suddenly like the ears of a horse. Up to that moment I’d visualised the scene perfectly. You destroyed my illusion by bringing in a horse . . . Can you bear it if I go on in this strain?

  I hope to finish reading the story tonight.

  FROM DANIEL GEORGE

  8.7.56

  Dear Ian,

  Wm looked in at B Sq for a moment on Friday to say goodbye. As I hadn’t then finished reading your book I wasn’t able to discuss it with him properly – only to share his approval of it. He said something about an anti-climax, but I haven’t discovered what he means. My own criticisms follow. You’d better brace up: I’ve given it the A-Z treatment.

  CHAP 1. A superb opening – just the job for your lady readers. Queries. p. 8. “. . . in the house the telephone started ringing loudly.” (Parenthesis. Things throughout the book always ‘start’ – never ‘begin’. Why can’t they just happen? What’s wrong with ‘the telephone in the house rang loudly’? Granted that out in the garden the ring of the telephone could be heard, would the answerer’s voice be audible? Why (3rd line from bottom of this page) should the girl be afraid of being caught listening? Perhaps you’re right, though, about this: she was scared of exhibiting any kind of curiosity. We don’t, by the way, hear any more about her. No reason why we should, of course.

  “There was” occurs seven times in this chapter, and “there were” once. An excess of “and”, “but”, “then”, and “that” is noticeable.

  CHAP 2. This must, or should have been, the most difficult chapter for you to write, especially from p. 14 onwards. In some respects, no doubt you are aware, Grant’s career is paralleled by Kerim’s (p. 147). I am not quite sure whether your style here is dead-pan enough. Anyhow, some cluttering words could be weeded out.

  “There was” occurs at least 6 times; “there were” four.

  CHAP 3. Don’t you think that on p. 26 you have made Grant a little too stupid? He seems sharp enough – almost out of character – when he meets Bond.

  Not so many examples here of “there were” and “there are”.

  CHAP 4. An excellent chapter – and since it begins in the present tense we have a change from “there was” and “there were” to “there are” and “there is”.

  CHAP 5. Also v.g. The usual ‘therewasery’ occurs.

  CHAP 6&7. Ditto. Here, as throughout the book, I have made pencilled notes drawing attention to odd or repeated words and phrases. (When you see them you’ll want to order me Rosa Klebb’s No. 36)

  You will be right in assuming that, subject to my infuriating pedantries, I have nothing but praise for everything until we get to Chapter 11 (p.99). Here I think there is a flaw – fortunately one that can be removed by simple elimination.

  Why should May ask a door-to-door salesman for his ‘union card’? A person of her status would not have heard of such a thing. If she had, she would surely know enough not to ask a salesman for one. To what union could he possibly belong? It’s weak to say that the man’s card indicated he belonged to the Electrician’s Union. If he were a member of that union he wouldn’t be selling TV sets in his own time . . . No, this business is all nonsense, and must go. There’s no point in it anyway. Nothing develops from it.

  p. 104, last lines. Couldn’t Paymaster Captain Troop have been just as objectionable if he had not been a Ranker? It looks like a gratuitous piece of sn
obbery to mention his lowly origin.

  All the rest commanded my unqualified admiration. I think this is your best book, the most tightly and ingeniously constructed, the most original. It’s so good that it deserves serious surface re-consideration. I mean, you can afford not to use worn-out phrases. If you must go in for mannerisms, let them be new mannerisms. On some pages the sentences all begin with ‘And’. I can’t see the point of this. Presumably you are aiming at producing an effect of panting continuity. Take out all the ‘Ands’ and see if it makes any difference.

  I once wrote that while for ordinary novelists ‘Far off a dog barked’ or ‘Somewhere in the house a tap dripped’ was good enough, Galsworthy had to have ‘In the distance a peacock shrieked’. You, I see, have ‘Somewhere a horse neighed’ (p. 144) and ‘Somewhere a cock crowed’ on p. 195. Congratulations! Congratulations also on having only one instance of knuckle-whitening. Shoulder-shrugging, I regret to say, is too much in evidence. There’s no lip-biting, though.

  I shall be away from B Sq all this week. Shall I keep the typescript here or post it back to you?

  Bond could see Fleming’s face as he read this letter. There was a sudden snapping together of his jaws, and his brows shot up into a corrugation. Then he threw the letter from him. ‘Man must be mad,’ he muttered under his breath.

  Yours ever,

  P.S. All your action & horror scenes are as good as anything I have ever read in this genre.

  TO DANIEL GEORGE, ESQ., 18 East Heath Road, Hampstead, N.W.5.

  9th July, 1956

  What a wonderful letter to get on a Monday morning.

  My best book? Do you really mean it? One gets so blind about one’s own scribblings and I feared the whole Bond joke might be getting a bit stale.

  I agree with all your points and will bend my mind to them directly I get the manuscript back. Do you think you could post it to 16 Victoria Square, S.W.1. or perhaps drop it in on the way to one of your lunches.

  You are mad to think that I am thin-skinned about criticisms. One longs for them and the only place one gets them from is this publisher’s reader.

  The only point you make that I would query is your most vehement one about the TV salesman. I felt I had to make him sound rather a suspicious character and give him something of a Communist smear via the E.T.U., otherwise why should Bond prick his ears.

  However, this and many other points I would love to discuss with you and I wonder if you would care to have lunch one day next week except Wednesday. I should think Hommany Grits and Branch water are about all you will be able to stand after this week’s junketing.

  Anyway, my very warmest thanks for your kind words and, above all, for having taken the trouble to read the rather messy typescript so quickly and thoroughly [. . .].

  I badly needed a heartening letter and, above all, one from a real expert.

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD

  To Fleming’s dismay Michael Howard (who always harboured a vague disquiet about Bond) took a very different tack from William Plomer and Daniel George. There was one incident in particular that raised his hackles: a fight between two naked gypsy women for the affections of their man.

  17th July, 1956

  Dear Michael,

  Many thanks for reading the book so promptly and also for the truthful opinions.

  Personally, I don’t know what to think – Daniel says it is my best book and appears to mean it, and William was also very congratulatory. I am sure I know them too well for them to have written me something they didn’t mean, so perhaps the answer is that the book has merits in a different sphere from the usual Bond formula.

  I won’t bother you with Daniel’s and William’s views because, presumably, they will be put down in an unvarnished form in their reports, but I am certainly depressed that you appear to have seen no merits whatsoever in the book.

  My own comments on what you say are:

  (a) I think the Russians seem dull because Russians are dull people and I intended to paint a picture of rather drab grimness, which is what Russia is like. SMERSH is, after all, a machine, whereas Drax was an individual. One of the troubles about the book is that so much of my description of SMERSH is absolutely true. Moreover, one simply can’t go on inventing good villains. They are far more difficult to come by than heroes or heroines.

  (b) the point about Bond is that he makes a fool of himself and falls headlong into the trap. This is a change from making him the cardboard hero and I cannot help thinking it is a healthy change. There is so much danger of these books being all alike and my main satisfaction (such as it is) with the book is that a Formula which was getting stale has been broken.

  (c) I cannot say anything on the score of suspense because the book obviously has no suspense for me. Surely there was some suspense in wondering how far Bond was going to fall into the trap which we had seen laid.

  (d) I don’t see your point about the masseuse in what Daniel describes as “a superb opening”, and what other use could have been made of her? It is intended to be a rather quiet opening with the “surprise” at the end, of finding that one is in Russia while, at the same time, introducing an unpleasant man.

  (e) if Bond had stopped those women fighting there would have been no chapter. And the same applies to the break-in of the Faceless Ones. It would have been out of character for Bond to have stopped the fighting and so I had to stop it for him.

  (f) I agree about the plans and the nightgown.

  Subject to what Daniel and William say in their reports, my own view is that, while this may not be the perfect dish for the registered Bond reader, it will be considered by the more thoughtful ones a welcome departure from routine and I think there are enough nasty individual scenes to placate the Bond addict.

  So far as the end is concerned, both Daniel and William are very much in favour.

  Personally, I think I shall get a good deal of reader criticism such as yours, but I do think it is a good thing to produce a Bond book which is out of the ordinary and which has, in my opinion, an ingenious and interesting plot. There is also the point that one simply can’t go on writing the simple bang-bang, kiss-kiss, type of book. However hard one works at it, you automatically become staler and staler and very quickly the staleness shows through to the reader and then all is indeed lost.

  However, these are just my thoughts and I perfectly respect your point of view, though I admit to being depressed that there was no single aspect of the book which seems to have tickled your fancy.

  Incidentally, I am off to America on the 26th and propose to polish the book up while I am away, so I would be grateful to hear in the next few days if you intend to publish it or not and, if you publish it, what your timetable is likely to be. It will be ready for the printer at the end of August and it is very important for me to get the page proofs and finish with them so as quickly to clear my mind for the next one.

  The main joke about this letter is that it has caused me to tear up one I dictated last night which suggested that, on the basis of Daniel’s and William’s comments, you should put the book in for the Evening Standard £5,000 prize!

  TO MICHAEL HOWARD

  Howard sent an emollient note but still queried the necessity for a topless masseuse in the first chapter.

  24th July, 1956

  Dear Michael,

  Many thanks for your charming letter, and I can assure you that I was only fussed by your criticisms in so far as they represented the first of what I expect to get from some of my readers who would really prefer to have the mixture as before.

  I shall certainly try and deal with one or two of your factual points on my way through the book at the end of this week. The point about the masseuse stripping is that they do in the Crimea, and I meant the reader, at the end of the chapter, to realise that he might have known where he was. But I think the point is too obscure and needs cleaning up. I will also try and clarify the fighting women though, as a matter of fact, Bond did not stop the fight.

  If
I let you have the final typescript at the end of August, could I have the proofs by the beginning of October or thereabouts? If I can get them done fairly quickly it leaves me a couple of months before I go to Jamaica to start worrying about the next one, which one really can’t do until this one is finally out of the way.

  If anything comes up while I am away, cables addressed to KEMNEWS NEWYORK and beginning PROFLEMING will be passed on to me wherever I am.

  Meanwhile, many thanks again for reading the book so quickly and thoroughly. My swift riposte would not have been sent off if I hadn’t had a ghastly fear that not a single chapter of the book appeared to have excited you. I am afraid all authors are sensitive and require that the pill shall be wrapped up with at least one grain of sugar!