The result was published in three consecutive issues of the Sunday Times under the title ‘Treasure Hunt in Eden’. Part travelogue, part mystery story and part paean to a romantic outpost on the rim of the British Empire, every paragraph shone with enthusiasm. It was one of his finest pieces of journalism, yet one that for all its energy carried a wistful coda. ‘I could convey no picture of these treasure islands,’ he wrote, ‘without explaining that the bizarre is the norm of a visitor’s life and the vivid highlights of the Seychelles are in extraordinary contrast to the creeping drabness, the lowest-common-denominator atmosphere that is rapidly engulfing us in Britain.’
Determined to keep drabness to a minimum, he embarked on an Italian holiday with Ann, followed by a trip to Monte Carlo where he had arranged a meeting with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis to discuss scripting a film about the casino. Although they reached a verbal agreement Fleming had to turn it down because he was shortly afterwards invited by CBS to write a series of Bond adventures for television. That June he flew to America to discuss matters, but for one reason and another the deal fell through. It was a disappointment but not too much because a further opportunity arrived in November when he was introduced to film producer Kevin McClory who was keen to develop Bond for the big screen.
All in all, life was looking good, and the year had supplied so much novelistic material that it was hard to distil it into a single volume. Accordingly, he decided that Bond’s next outing would best be served by a collection of short stories.
TO GRAHAM HUGHES, ESQ., Goldsmith’s Hall, Foster Lane, Cheapside, E.C.2.
In the course of his research Fleming approached several experts, some of whom found his queries too dubious for their normal course of business. Mr Hughes was among them, and directed Fleming towards a more accommodating firm, Johnson Mattheys.
30th August, 1957
I really am most grateful for the trouble you have taken over my questions, and would you please thank Mr. J. S. Forbes for having provided many of the answers.
I realised that a lot of my queries were most improper ones to address to The Worshipful Company and I confess that your maidenly question marks in answer to some of my murkier questions made me smile.
I do apologise again for all the trouble I have caused you and for the many raised eyebrows there must have been at Goldsmith’s Hall in the past few weeks.
I will now proceed to pester Mr. Roberts of Johnson Mattheys and I hope he will be as indulgent as you have been.
TO S. C. ROBERTS, ESQ., Messrs. Johnson Mattheys, Hatton Garden, W.C.1.
30th August, 1957
Your name has been given to me by Mr. Graham Hughes of Goldsmith’s Hall and I wonder if you would be kind enough to help me. I am writing a novel of suspense in which Gold plays a conspicuous part and I am most anxious to document myself on some out-of-the-way aspects of the metal.
Mr. Hughes has helped me over many of my questions and he suggests that you might be kind enough to educate me on some other aspects of the subject.
I would also greatly appreciate being allowed to watch the actual process of melting miscellaneous gold objects at your refinery. May I call upon you at any time when you have half an hour to spare?
Please forgive me for enlisting your help in these author’s problems but experts in gold are very few and far between.
TO ANN, Goldeneye
Ann refused to come to Jamaica that year. It wasn’t her fear of flying, or the prospect of a stormy crossing by sea, that put her off. Rather, it was the slow disintegration of their marriage. The past few months had been hard for both of them and Ann saw Goldeneye as one source of their woes.
Sunday [early January, 1958]
My darling,
It is all just the same except that everything is bigger and more. The flight was perfect, only five minutes late at Mo Bay. Mrs D’Erlanger was on board with her daughter, which may have helped.1 She seemed quite pleasant and was very queenly with the ground staffs at all the stops. I arrived in a tempest and it has stormed more or less ever since – torrential winds and rains which are going on now and look as if they would go on for ever. Thank God for the book at which I hammer away in between bathing in the rain and sweating around the garden in a macintosh [. . .]The sofas were covered with [stains] as it appears the servants have used the house as their own since I left. Paint peeling off the eaves, chips and cracks all over the floor and not one bottle of marmalade or preserves. So I have had to set to and get in the painters etc. who are still banging away after a week. Noël and company aren’t coming out till April. The Nude is to have a season at San Francisco. Apparently Noël wears a crew cut in it which must look horrible.
Well, that’s what Flemings call a Sitrep, just to show you I’m alive. I can’t write about other things. My nerves are still jangling like church bells and I am completely demoralised by the past month. I think silence will do us both good and let things heal. Please put your health before anything else. Try and put a good face on the house2 and don’t let your hate of it spread to the others or we shall indeed end up a miserable crew, which would be quite ridiculous to say the least of it.
Take endless care of yourself.
XXX
Ian
TO ANN, Goldeneye
The tribulations of Goldeneye aside, Ann resented having to spend time in Kent, where she knew nobody and languished alone while Ian went off happily to play golf. She wanted them to find a new home, away from his old stamping grounds. Fleming was uncertain – Ann had recently spent time in a clinic and was taking a variety of anti-depressants – but he went along anyway. They eventually settled on a house in Sevenhampton, near Swindon, which, after extensions and several years’ building work, had all the attributes they required but managed at the same time to suit neither of them very well.
20th January, 1958
My love,
At last a letter from you after more than two weeks. They both arrived together – a left and right hook! Well, if life somewhere else will make you happy we must move, as anyway living with an unhappy you is impossible. But do remember that one cannot live by whim alone and chaos is the most expensive as well as the most wearying luxury in the world. And for heaven’s sake don’t hurry. Do let’s take real backbreaking trouble before we spend all this fresh money and have to spend more keeping up the sort of house I suppose you are looking for. And I beg you to have a stream or river in the grounds, I shall simply pine away if we go to live in the middle of a lot of plough with deadly little walks down lanes and dons every weekend.3 But anything, anything to make you smile again and find you somewhere where you will rest and not tear yourself to pieces. I’m terribly worried about your health and I pray that Enton’s prison walls have mended your darling heart and somehow got you off this tragic switchback of pills which I implore you to stop. They have nothing to do with the [Bekesbourne] Palace but are a way of life which is killing you, and me with you because it horrifies me so much. You’ve no idea how they change you – first the febrile, almost hysterical gaiety and then those terrible snores that seem to come from the tomb! Darling, forgive me, but it is so and all I get is the fag end of a person at the end of the day or at weekends. If a new house will help all that let us move as soon as we can and I will have to invent a new kind of life for myself instead of golf which I shall want to play neither with Michael Astor nor Hughie. I’m fed up with other people’s neuroses. I have enough of my own. But don’t pretend that I am always travelling or am always going to travel. One changes and gets older and anyway by next summer I will have seen the world once and for all. Here is different because it is peace and there is that wonderful vacuum of days that makes one work. And do count the cost. Your pot is down to about 70,000 and two more years at 10,000 a year will reduce it to your iron ration of 50 after which we shall just have to live on income. Mama can easily live another ten or twenty years.4 Living on our combined incomes means that we shall not have more than 5000 a year which is as rich as
one can be. One can live well on that in one house but not in two. These facts have got to be faced just as it had to be faced that we should leave St Margaret’s quickly.
My darlingest darlingest love get well and write me a happy letter. I would give anything for one. Bless you and hugs and kisses.
TO ANN, Goldeneye
Tuesday [undated]
My sweetheart,
A vulture is sitting on top of the roof above my head. It is squatting on its stomach across the gable like a hen roosting and looks too ridiculous. When I walked out into the garden just now away from my bondage I thought this would be a bad omen and that there would still be no letter from you. I have spent a whole week getting up and peering towards the tray to see if something has arrived. But the funny vulture was a good omen and there was a nice fat packet from you which I have now devoured. I think you manage to write very sweet letters in answer to my vehement ones most of which I always regret when they have gone, and I promise I understand every bit of your point of view. If I FIGHT my case it is just for the same reason as you FIGHT yours. We both feel the other is getting too much of the cake when in fact there’s plenty for both if only we’d sit down peacefully and share it instead of grabbing. I envy you your life of parties and ‘the mind’ and you envy I suppose my life of action and the fun I get from my books. The answer is that compared to most people we are both enviable and lead enviable lives. I perfectly see your point about the house and I only beg that where we finally settle will have something that appeases my savage breast – some outlet for activity, because I am hopeless and like a caged beast in drawing- and dining-rooms and there is nothing I can do about it. It’s instinctive. You used to sympathise with it and in a way I admire it in me, but I realise it must be hell to live with and I can only say that if it has an outlet I can keep it under some sort of control.
I must now go and bathe in the grey sea and then go for a long walk up a mountain to sweat the gloom away. I shall be home in a minute my love. Kisses and kisses and kisses.
FROM WILLIAM PLOMER
28 June, 1958
My dear Ian,
I have just finished Goldfinger, & have found that it stuck to me like a limpet, or limpet-mine. I think it well up to your best Bond level, full of ingenious invention, & fantasy, & interesting or curious or unfamiliar detail. You certainly needn’t have warned me about the golf. I found the tension of the game tremendous. In fact, I believe you could create extreme anxiety out of a cake-judging competition at a Women’s Institute – one of the cakes would probably be a product of nuclear fission, or of bacterial warfare at least.
I was quite sorry to see the last – and what an exit! – of Oddjob: one had got so used to having him around. I particularly liked the conversation with the gangsters – and of the gangsters – at the conference table. Pussy is a real wit – I should like to read a whole book about her.
I don’t much like the circular saw business. I think it too like a caricature of your previous torture-scenes. It doesn’t (for me) create alarm or suspense – it is too wildly unreal. Surely a circular saw makes far too much noise for any simultaneous talk to be heard? And anatomically I am a little worried. Whizz goes a fly-button – but didn’t other objects get in the way first, or does Bond have undescended testicles?
Couldn’t you dispense with this sort of torture-scene here, and make use instead of the zillionaire’s hypnotic powers? Couldn’t he use them on Bond and silly Tilly, in order to get a hold over them, & get then aboard the westward-bound aircraft? Yes?
I don’t feel that the circular saw produces any frisson in the reader – merely a guffaw. Am I wrong?
Also, p. 111, Colonel Smithers is a fearful bore. Do we need him at all? And if so, could we have his lecturette shortened or omitted? It is terribly unreal to me. Bond had surely only to consult an encyclopedia if he wanted to know about gold. I should be inclined to cut the visit to the Bank altogether.
I enclose a list of notes & queries. I expect Daniel will be sending you more, when he has read the story.
I have corrected your spelling of cabochon, carrosserie, bagagiste, & Alsatian.
Is there any particular reason for writing “Mister” out in full instead of “Mr”?
And what happened to the Claddagh ring? I did hope it would turn up again. I expect Goldfinger melted it down & sent it off to India . . .
Now I fear this letter will look like a picking of holes, or attempted picking of holes, in the stout & brilliant fabric you have woven. Not at all, of course. I only wish it to be as well armoured as possible against the digs of envious reviewers & readers. Speaking for myself, I must say I have enjoyed the proceedings immensely – more, in some ways, than ever before. And, as you know, I send you every possible wish for the utmost success.
I shall look out for the Home Service on 10 July,5 & shall hope to see Q. of S. in the Sunday Times,6 & to see you when you come back, with gold on your fingers, from N.Y.
TO MISS JENNIFER ARMOUR, Messrs. Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 30 Bedford Square, W.C.1.
Jennifer Armour, Cape’s marketing director, wrote enclosing the proofs of advertisements due to appear in The Bookseller, and also requesting Fleming’s signature in a copy of Goldfinger. It was a present for her brother, who was shortly to turn twenty-one ‘and whose literary education (and consequent behaviour) has been almost entirely confined and influenced by James Bond’. She explained that he had been expelled from both school and the Navy and was ‘a generally Bad Lot, all on account of Bond’.
11th March, 1959
This seems to be a pretty poor 21st Birthday present for what sounds like an expensive young man, but anyway here is the autographed copy. Tell him that both Winston Churchill and I were black sheep once and that, as long as he doesn’t make it a habit, it isn’t a bad way of life up to around the age of 21, which is approximately when my own shade of black dwindled to its present elephant’s breath grey.
Many thanks for the pulls of the advertisements. The long one is very saucy indeed and perhaps you noticed that the News Chronicle also commented on it.
TO BERNARD DARWIN, ESQ., Dormy House Club, Rye, Sussex
In one of his finer authorial moments Fleming managed to dedicate three whole chapters to a game of golf without once losing the reader’s interest. The match, between Bond and Goldfinger, ended in the latter’s defeat despite his having cheated. However, as many golfers pointed out, Goldfinger had theoretically won. It concerned a matter of balls.
8th April, 1959
Thank you very much for your kindly letter and I will now confess that a lot of my cronies at the Royal St. Marks, such as Beck and Hill, say they would have given the match to Goldfinger because he ended the match with the ball he had started with. It is clearly a matter for the Rules of Golf committee and the matter must, of course, be raised officially with Gerald Micklem.
TO THE HON. ANTHONY BERRY
Fleming’s friend Anthony Berry (son of his employer, Lord Kemsley) wrote to say that the journalist Jack Jones would mention Goldfinger in the Western Mail – for which service he, Berry, expected to be rewarded in gold bullion. He had, however, one small criticism concerning wine: ‘But should not Goldfinger have known that Piesporter Goldtropfchen is a Moselle and not a Hock?’
8th April, 1959
I shuddered when I got your note and hastily reached for the book. Within an hour I was talking to Ian Gilmour7 and he also made the point.
It is maddening and I have hastily put in a correction for the next edition they are printing. I had asked my invaluable secretary, Una Trueblood, to check on one or two facts in the manuscript and, in particular, to ring up my wine merchant and ask him for the name of the finest hock he had. When he produced this one I put it in without question. Obviously I must change my wine merchant.
I hope Jack Jones will give it the works in his series and, when he does, an old gold filling from one of my teeth will reach you in return.
When can I come down and visit you b
oth to discuss Kemsley Newspapers and canasta?
TO LEONARD RUSSELL, ESQ., 14 Albion Street, Hyde Park, London, W.2.
Leonard Russell was Literary Editor of the Sunday Times, as well as being a friend of Fleming and a fellow golfer.
9th April, 1959
It really is shameful that you haven’t yet finished “Goldfinger”. I suppose you’re lounging around on a tiger-skin sofa eating a big box of chocs and reading Diana Cooper!
I’m very proud of your performance on the golf course since my lesson. The Royal St. Georges is blushing with pleasure at their newly acquired fame. But there is talk that, in fact, Goldfinger won the match because he began and ended the 18th hole with the same ball and I am being strongly urged to submit the whole matter to the Rules of Golf committee. This I am doing today.
You are missing nothing here and if I was you I should stick to the chocs and the tiger skin.
Love to Dilys and see you both soon I hope.
TO MISS R. N. RENDLE, 48 Hammond Road, Fareham, Hampshire
27th April, 1959
How very kind of you to have written and I am delighted that you are such a firm fan of James Bond. Some of his critics don’t like him because he enjoys himself too much!
I suppose one day James Bond will come to a sticky end but, at the present moment, he is in excellent health and quite able to look after himself. I know he will be encouraged to stay alive in view of your interest in him!
I enclose a dreadful photograph of myself which you have my permission to put on the fire.
TO JACK JONES, ESQ., The Western Mail, Cardiff
29th April, 1959
I have been away for ten days, but I must write immediately to thank you sincerely for the extremely kind things you wrote about “Goldfinger” in the Western Mail. It was wonderfully encouraging appreciation by somebody who would not normally stoop to my kind of book, and I am most grateful.
The Man with the Golden Typewriter Page 20
