The Man with the Golden Typewriter

by Bloomsbury Publishing

  The Sunday Times have gone on urging me to suggest another series and I have turned down so many of their ideas that I finally proposed to do a series called “Round The World In Eight Adventures” and they are ecstatic.

  I have the adventures more or less mapped out – a real treasure hunt that is going on in the Seychelles, the Great Cave of Niah in North Borneo, gold-smuggling in Macao, and so forth, and I shall take a Leica.

  I can’t say how the project will turn out, nor whether I shall have enough energy to play Red Indians when the time comes, but that is the idea at the moment.

  The connecting theme is that the world is still a very exciting place in spite of aeroplanes and suchlike and that just because some types of adventure are old-fashioned that doesn’t make them any less exciting.

  The idea is that I should go off at the end of April and take two to three months over it. Anyway we will see, and I only mention the project now as I am writing to you.

  Whatever you think of it, please keep entirely to yourselves – even more so than the ‘Diamond Smugglers’ because (a) I don’t know whether I shall do it yet and (b) it may not come off.

  TO C. E. MAISEY, ESQ., The City Bookshop, 164 High Street, Guildford, Surrey

  13th March, 1958

  How very kind indeed of you to have written to me about “Doctor No”.

  It is quite remarkable that a busy man like yourself, who receives thousands of books every year, should find the time to write to an author of one of them.

  As a matter of fact, your charming letter couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time as I have been soundly laid across the barrel in this month’s issue of The Twentieth Century11 and my ego was mildly dented.

  Since, by the same post as your last letter, I received news that Raymond Chandler wants to review “Doctor No” in the Sunday Times, this double windfall has completely restored the crack in the veneer.

  Thank you very much indeed and the next time I am in Guildford I shall make a point of calling on you and thanking you in person.

  TO THE EDITOR of the Manchester Guardian

  Fleming had suffered a rebuke at the hands of Bernard Bergonzi in Twentieth Century for ‘a diet of unrestricted sadism and satyriasis’. This was followed by an article in the Guardian condemning him for ‘the cult of luxury for its own sake’. It was a sinister development, the paper intoned, and a sign of moral decay: ‘This is an advertising agency world, where the man of distinction sits secure in the knowledge that his is the very best butter. And since the reader is plainly expected to identify himself with Bond, these works are symptomatic of a decline in taste.’ In a soul-searching trump of despair: ‘If one of the most bourgeois and peaceable people of the world decide that a diet of sex and violence is to its liking, is it not because it can thereby sublimate its more anti-social instincts?’ Fleming was goaded to reply.

  5th April, 1958

  Sir, – I am most grateful for the scholarly examination of my James Bond stories in your leader columns on Monday but, since this follows close upon a nine-page inquest in “The Twentieth Century,” I hope you will forgive a squeak from the butterfly before any more big wheels roll down upon it.

  It is true that sex plays an important part in James Bond’s life and that his profession requires him to be more or less constantly involved in violent action. It is also true that, as in any real spy-life, when the villain gets hold of Bond, Bond is made to suffer painfully. What other punishment for failure would be appropriate – that Bond should receive an extra heavy demand note from the Inland Revenue, or that he should be reduced in his Civil Service rank from principal officer to acting principal?

  But, as you, sir, put it “What is more sinister is the cult of luxury for its own sake – and the kind of luxury held up for the reader’s emulation. The idea that anyone should smoke a brand of cigarette not because they enjoy them but because they are ‘exclusive’ (that is, because they cost more) is pernicious and it is implicit in all Mr Fleming’s glib descriptions of food, drink and clothes.”

  I accept the rebuke, but more on the score of vulgarity than on the counts you recite. I have this to say in my extenuation: One of the reasons why I chose the pseudonym of James Bond for my hero rather than, say, Peregrine Maltravers was that I wished him to be unobtrusive. Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department.

  But to create an illusion of depth I had to fit Bond out with some theatrical props and, while I kept his wardrobe as discreet as his personality, I did equip him with a distinctive gun and, though they are a security hazard, with distinctive cigarettes. This latter touch of display unfortunately went to my head. I proceeded to invent a cocktail for Bond (which I sampled several months later and found unpalatable), and a rather precious though basically simple meal ordered by Bond proved so popular with my readers, still suffering from wartime restrictions, that expensive, though I think not ostentatious, meals have been eaten in subsequent books.

  The gimmickry grew like bindweed and now, while it still amuses me, it has become an unfortunate trade-mark. I myself abhor Wine-and-Foodmanship. My own favourite food is scrambled eggs (in “Live and Let Die” a proof-reader pointed out that Bond’s addiction to scrambled eggs was becoming a security risk and I had to go through the book changing menus) and I smoke your own, Mancunian, brand of Virginia tobacco.

  However, now that Bond is irretrievably saddled with these vulgar foibles, I can only plead that his Morland cigarettes are less expensive than the Balkan Sobranies of countless other heroes, that he eats far less and far less well than Nero Wolfe, and that his battered Bentley is no Hirondelle.

  Perhaps these are superficial excuses. Perhaps Bond’s blatant heterosexuality is a subconscious protest against the current fashion for sexual confusion. Perhaps the violence springs from a psychosomatic rejection of Welfare wigs, teeth, and spectacles and Bond’s luxury meals are simply saying “no” to toad-in-the-hole and tele-bickies.

  Who can say? Who can say whether or not Dr Fu Manchu was a traumatic image of Sax Rohmer’s father? Who, for the matter of that, cares?

  Yours &c.

  IAN FLEMING

  FROM NOËL COWARD, Firefly Hill, Port Maria, Jamaica, B.W.I.

  6th May, 1958

  Dearest Beast,

  This is just to inform you that I have read ‘Dr No’ from cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed every moment of it. Your descriptive passages, as usual, are really very good indeed, but, as the gentleman in Oklahoma sings about Kansas City, ‘You’ve gone about as fur as you ken go.’ I am willing to accept the centipede, the tarantulas, the land crabs, the giant squid (except on that beastly table at Goldeneye). I am even willing to forgive your reckless use of invented verbs – ‘I inch, Thou inches – He snakes, I snake, We palp, They palp, etc; but what I will neither accept nor forgive is the highly inaccurate statement that when it is eleven A.M. in Jamaica, it is six A.M. in dear old England. This dear boy, not to put too fine a point on it, is a fucking lie. When it is eleven A.M. in Jamaica, it is four P.M. in dear old England and it is carelessness of this kind that makes my eyes steel slits of blue. I was also slightly shocked by the lascivious announcement that Honeychile’s bottom was like a boy’s! I know that we are all becoming progressively more broadminded nowadays but really old chap what could you have been thinking of?

  I am snaking off to New York on Thursday where I shall be for two weeks and then I inch to Cannes, or rather Biot, where I shall be for June and July.

  I have been very sad without you although Blanche [Blackwell] takes me to Goldeneye every so often to have a swim and a good cry. Violet [Fleming’s housekeeper], I fear, is rapidly losing her looks, what with childbearing and one thing and another, but I think it is really one thing and another.

  I must weedle this letter to a close now and clank into my shower as Cargill12 of The Gleaner is coming to dinner.

  Love and kisses to A
nnie and my Godson [Caspar]13 and the usual slavering hero worship for yourself.

  TO B. W. GOODEN, ESQ., 10 Old Broad Street, London, E.C.2.

  Although Mr Gooden’s original letter is lost, he clearly had a point to raise about Bond’s choice of watch.

  5th June, 1958

  I have just got back from abroad to find your sapient rebuke of 007’s time-keeping equipment.

  I have discussed this with him and he points out that the Rolex Oyster Perpetual weighs about six ounces and would appreciably slow up the use of his left hand in combat. His practice, in fact, is to use fairly cheap, expendable wrist watches on expanding metal bracelets which can be slipped forward over the thumb and used in the form of a knuckle-duster, either on the outside or the inside of the hand.

  In passing on his comments to you, I would add that James Bond has trained himself to tell the time by the sun in either hemisphere within a few minutes.

  Thank you, nevertheless, for raising the point and 007 wishes to assure you that when an appropriate time-piece is available he will wear it.

  TO F. N. GARDNER, ESQ., F.L.A., Highcroft, Woodbury Hill Path, Luton, Beds.

  24th June, 1958

  Jonathan Cape have been kind enough to let me see the stern and well spirited thousand-word rebuke you have addressed to “Now And Then”.14

  I can find no fault with your well argued statement. Doctor No was certainly the hero of the book and James Bond the villain. It is high time Bond stopped poking his nose into the lives of these soft-living and, on the whole, harmless monsters.

  On the further points you make I should, however, mention that Bond, as a member of the Civil Servant’s Union, would have had plenty of high level Union protection if it had come to an argument with other Whitehall authorities.

  One small point. It is quite clear that, living in land-girt Luton, your acquaintanceship with octopuses is small. They are, in fact, timorous creatures of great charm and positive kittens compared with the giant squid with which Bond had to wrestle for his life.

  Anyway, my warmest thanks for your scholarly interest in my opuscula and I look forward greatly to seeing your essay reprinted in “Now And Then”.

  TO W. SPEID, ESQ., P.B. 164 R., Bulawayo, S. Rhodesia

  W. Speid (of what is now Zimbabwe) thought that ‘Bond’s adventures are starting to verge on the fantastic’. Unlike From Russia with Love, none of the characters seemed real and he particularly didn’t believe in Dr No, who was merely a ‘puppet invented to put Bond through the hoops’. In terms of authenticity, Speid recommended John Marquand’s Stopover: Tokyo (1957). He also suggested Bond should go to Austria, or maybe Venice, and do some real spying.

  14th October, 1958

  Thank you very much for your most perceptive letter of September 14th and, as a matter of fact, I entirely agree with you. “Doctor No” was very cardboardy and need not have been.

  But I do not agree with you over Marquand’s “Stopover Tokyo”. I much preferred his earlier books about Mr. Moto.

  The trouble is that it is much more fun to think up fantastic situations and mix Bond up in them. The ordinary spy world is, in fact, a very drab one and, while a great book waits to be written about it, I am not the one to write it.

  I am glad to say that my next book “Goldfinger”, which will come out in March, does not touch on the Caribbean, but I dare say you will find this book also somewhat air-borne and I am only sorry that I am in danger of losing such a sensible and humorous-minded reader.

  Again with many thanks for having taken the trouble to write to me.

  TO TERRY WING, ESQ., Sentry Hill, Marlow, Bucks.

  A teenage pupil wrote to settle a bet he had made with a classmate as to whether or not Fleming came from the vicinity of their school.

  21st June, 1962

  Thank you very much for your letter of June 15th and you are right in thinking that Dr. No is the sequel to From Russia with Love.

  I think you ought to call off the bet with Macfie as in fact I used to live at Nettlebed and my brother [Peter] lives there. So he was nearly right.

  Certainly I do a lot of travelling as one can’t really write truthfully about a place one hasn’t seen for one’s self, and having been in Naval Intelligence during the war, I do know something about spies and spying.

  I am at present driving a Ford Thunderbird which I have had for two years, but I am in the process of changing to a very new model, the Studebaker Avanti, with a top speed of 174 and acceleration from 0 to 60 in 6.5 seconds.15

  So far as your future is concerned I shouldn’t bother to try and emulate James Bond. You are already an adventurous chap with plenty of guts or you wouldn’t be writing to authors out of the blue at the age of 12 and a bit!

  As a prize for your enterprise (bad English that!) I am sending you an autographed copy of my last but one book, which you don’t seem to have read.

  Best of luck for the future.

  9

  Goldfinger

  In 1958, Fleming wrote a review of The Spy’s Bedside Book, an anthology of spy stories edited by Graham and Hugh Greene, to which he himself was a contributor. The first sentence read: ‘I cannot understand why the great spy novel has never been written.’ He had, in fact, just completed a rather good one himself.

  Among the items that piqued his imagination during the 1955 Interpol conference in Istanbul had been a report by the Indian representative on the magnitude of gold smuggling and the ingenuity of its practitioners. It was the second most smuggled commodity after heroin, the man said. In 1954 alone his country had intercepted more than six million pounds of contraband bullion, and this was barely the tip of the iceberg. So long a financial shadow had the war cast on the world’s currencies that everyone wanted gold, and there seemed no end to the means they would use to get their hands on it. As always, the combination of treasure and intrigue proved irresistible.

  Fleming began his research in the summer of 1957 and by the time he arrived in Goldeneye the following January he had a plot mapped out. Goldfinger centred, as with Moonraker, on a millionaire villain who liked to cheat at cards (also, in this case, golf). Unlike Drax, however, who planned to destroy Britain with a missile, Auric Goldfinger wanted to control the world’s gold supply – his ultimate goal being to seize the contents of Fort Knox. When his activities threatened to destabilise Britain’s economy, Bond was put on the case. Goldfinger was a splendidly unpleasant man, with a deft touch in torture and revenge: when one of his employees betrayed him he suffocated her by coating her entire body in gold paint; and when he caught Bond spying on him he splayed him across a saw table and waited patiently for him to talk as the circular blade moved slowly towards his groin. Almost as sinister as Goldfinger was his Korean henchman, Oddjob, who had a cleft palate, was a karate expert, ate cats and wore a steel-rimmed bowler hat that doubled as a deadly Frisbee.

  On the plus side, Bond was aided by his old friend Felix Leiter and a lesbian aviatrix named Pussy Galore who started in the employ of Goldfinger but was successfully turned (in more senses than one) by 007. The climax came when the combined efforts of Bond, Leiter and Galore succeeded in thwarting Goldfinger’s attempted assault on Fort Knox. But this was just a false horizon. As with Diamonds are Forever, further sensation awaited. This included not only the death of Goldfinger but the satisfactory outcome of Oddjob being extruded at high altitude through an aeroplane window.

  Fleming was at the top of his game. Goldfinger was full of energy and the longest of his novels. But his personal life was becoming ragged, his relationship with Ann having reached a state that could kindly be described as one of mutual bewilderment. Increasingly they went their separate ways, which in Fleming’s case took the form of a prolonged trip to the Seychelles in April 1958.

  He was travelling on journalistic business for the Sunday Times, the object being to report on a treasure hunt – not just a haphazard quest like his metal-detecting efforts at Creake Abbey in 1953 but the genuine, copper-bottomed art
icle supported by maps, historical research and a share issue with a potential return of £120 million. That the prospector (an ex-officer at Buckingham Palace) genuinely believed he was on to something, and did so with a fervour that by most standards would classify him as mildly insane, made it all the more enticing. The shareholders alone were of interest. As Fleming wrote of one: ‘In 1938 an elephant knelt on his left leg while a tigress chewed off his right. But that is how it is in this story. Even the smallest walk-on parts have a touch of the bizarre.’

  Getting to the Seychelles was itself an adventure, involving a twenty-four-hour flight to Bombay followed by a four-day journey by ship. Fleming was delighted by the fact that as they neared shore they were greeted not by seagulls but a large bat. And when filling out the customs declaration, ‘Instead of the usual warning about importing alcohol, agricultural machinery and parrots, I was cautioned that “Passengers must specifically state if they have in their possession OPIATES, ARMS AND AMMUNITION, BASE OR COUNTERFEIT COINS.’ The treasure hunt fitted perfectly into this scenario, carrying as it did a whiff of skulduggery, piracy and subterfuge. But it was the Seychelles themselves that took centre stage. Fleming was absorbed by their colourful history and the eccentric lives of their inhabitants. He noted that the cathedral clock struck twice in case people hadn’t heard it the first time, that it was an offence to carry more than one coconut, and that a local paper had just recorded the case of Regina v Archange Michel (indecent assault). ‘What do you make of that?’ he wrote.

  The flora and fauna were equally theatrical, including sang-dragon trees that oozed red sap when cut, cowries twice the size of golf balls that glittered like aquatic jewels, emerald lizards with blood-red toenails, and white terns that flew out to sea in pairs, seemingly with locked arms ‘like perfect skaters on a giant rink of blue ice’. Best of all was the ‘Vallai de Mai’ – which no less an authority than Gordon of Khartoum had located as the Garden of Eden – whose trees bore fruit and flowers that were, as Fleming explained, of ‘grotesque impudicity [. . .] When it is dark, they say that the trees march down to the sea and bathe and then march back up the valley and make massive love under the moon. I can well believe it.’