You told me Victor Weybright had commented that the start is rather slow. That strikes me as a superficial criticism: it is the whole approach to the story which sets the pace, and we find that one’s interest and attention are impelled from page one to the end with all the usual irresistibility, or more. Except for the motorcyclist, and the climactic encounter with Blofeld, strong-arm stuff gives way to a concentrated course in Oriental culture, methods and attitudes to living and dying which will be unfamiliar and fascinating to your readers, few of whom would come across it otherwise. It will be unexpected in this context, but not unwelcome. Into snow, yes, I know it has happened. But something to soften the impact with the sea would be a help to the incredulous; and couldn’t the balloon very easily be penetrated by one of those bullets and so subside less precipitously than Bond’s free fall?
Apart from this, and a general suggestion about the very ending which I’d like to talk over with you when possible, I have no specific criticism to offer. But I have sent off the MS to the office to be read by all the usual sharp-eyed detail-hawks, and will present a summary of findings in due course.
For now, our warmest thanks and appreciation for the twelfth instalment of this astounding saga. It would be less than justice to say you’ve done it again – you’ve done so much more!
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
11th June, 1963
My dear Michael,
Thank you very much for your most heart-warming letter which gave me immense pleasure as I had feared that you all might jib at the amount of travelogue in the book.
But I also privately feel that it makes a good change from the usual formula, and I am glad that you feel the interest of the background made up for having to wait for the action for so long.
I was also doubtful about the 500 feet and we can easily cut it down.
Please ring me as soon as possible and discuss the ending because I have some doubt about it – not the least of which is that I have no idea how to get him from Vladivostok back into his early life, if I have the energy and inventiveness to pursue his career further.
We should have great fun with Dickie Chopping over the jacket. My first thoughts are in the direction of a vast white chrysanthemum being chopped in half by a very ornately-bladed scimitar but perhaps this time we might let Chopping read the typescript and see if he comes up with an idea of his own.
Anyway, thank you again for most encouraging letter and I do hope your medical misfortunes are miraculously cured as a reward for your kind words.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
1st August, 1963
My dear Michael,
“You Only Live Twice”
I am getting on with the corrections and I think, with luck, you should have the finished article by the end of next week. But I would like to point out mildly that you have been sitting on the book for some two months and now expect me to do this rush job.
Another time wouldn’t it be better for you to do the rush job and me to do the sitting?
I don’t agree with you or William about the obituary and I would like it to stet. As for the Times masthead, I will try and get their permission to use it and I’m sure I shall have no difficulty. The main thing is that the whole obituary idea is a bit of a lark to which I am much attached.
TO C. D. HAMILTON
7th August, 1963
My dear C.D.,
I promised to let you have a note about my idea for a series called “Latter Day Adventurers”, but I put off writing in the hope that I could think of more names.
Unfortunately I can’t and all I can suggest are the following:-
1. The two Texas oil men who are the only experts in the world I think at putting out oil fires. They charge gigantic fees and are called in by all the great oil companies. They recently put out the great fire in the Sahara oil fields. Any oil company will give you the details.
2. There was a scheme afoot a year or two ago to salvage the Titanic. I don’t know who the people concerned are but Elaine Greene does.
3. How about the Swiss guide who has just done the first solo climb of the Eiger north wall?
Sorry for this meagre list but I am sure the brains of the Sunday Times will be able to think up some more.
Off to Simenon on Wednesday and back in the first week of September.
TO AMHERST VILLIERS, ESQ., 547 Erskine Drive, Pacific Palisades, California
Villiers, although he was primarily an engineer, was also involved in rocketry and had been exploring an attempt to reach Mars with the aid of the wartime German rocket scientist Werner von Braun.
16th October, 1963
My dear Amherst,
It was lovely to hear from you and I am glad at least to have your new address at last. I wanted to write to you several times in the last few months but had no idea where you were.
Your news is very exciting, but I am much more interested in your and Charles work on the Bentley than yours on the Mars project, which I regard as a great waste of money!
The Avanti is doing all right mechanically, but there are a lot of small bugs in the coachwork and fittings and owing to bad paintwork it is having to be resprayed at Studebaker’s expense. Also the windscreen has cracked. But it is certainly a good car and I shall live with it at any rate for another year.
The house [Sevenhampton] is more or less finished and we are installed and my life consists of cutting nettles and scraping mushrooms off my suits as a result of the proximity of the lake.
What about your London house, and who have you let it to?
When my book was published, the whole of England was plastered with reproductions of your portrait, and the doom-fraught eyes you gave me gazed out of practically every bookshop in the land. It is now down at the new house waiting to be suitably hung, probably next to a Sidney Nolan of a giant baboon!5
If I can find some excuse to come out to the West Coast I shall at once get in touch with you, but at the moment I am deeply involved in preparing for a maddening copyright case [about Thunderball] which is coming up on November 19th and is going to be a stupendous nuisance.
The first night of “From Russia with Love” was a majestic success and the queues formed all day round and round Leicester Square where it is showing at the Odeon. The whole film is a tremendous lark and I gather it will be coming to America before Christmas. So tell Nita [Villiers’ wife] to watch the papers and drag you off to it when it appears in your locality.
The cartoon in the New Yorker will certainly have done no harm to my publicity in the States and Jock Whitney was kind enough to buy the original from the New Yorker and send it to me.
Not much other news except that I miss you both very much and would like to have you both back here as soon as possible, even if it means that I have to submit to another portrait.
Much love to Nita and a sharp pinch for Charles [their son].
Salud!
FROM K. W. PURDY, ESQ., Ridgefield Road, Wilton, Connecticut
The writer Ken Purdy had interviewed Fleming earlier in the year for an article commissioned by Playboy. To mark the occasion he sent him as a memento his own Randall hunting knife. This remarkable object had a seven-inch blade, an ebony and ivory handle (the ebony being, as Purdy pointed out, impossibly slippery when covered in blood) and had seen hard service during two African safaris. It was capable of severing the head of a rhino, and to his certain knowledge had killed at least two men. Purdy being a motor enthusiast, his courier for this grisly gift was the champion racing driver Stirling Moss. ‘I must tell you that Stirling is basically very shy, and if he tries to get out of having lunch, or tries to send you the knife, please do insist. I don’t think you’ll have to do, because I have told him I want the knife put into your hand. Of course he almost never makes any appearance of shyness. He is a master at concealing his feelings, and as complicated a personality as I have known. As lovable, too.’ Whether or not the lunch took place is unrecorded.
9th October, 1963
My dear K
en,
I have just got back from abroad to find your letters of September 22nd and 29th and, to deal first with that of the 29th, I am totally overcome by your generosity.
Naturally I would love to have the knife and I was most interested by your account of Randall. Please don’t forget to send me his catalogue and any other literature he puts out. He sounds a fascinating man.
The knife itself will have a proud place on my walls, though I doubt if it will be put to any sterner use than cleaning my fingernails, but it’s a wonderful gift and I am indeed most grateful.
Stirling seems to forget that we know each other,6 and of course if he gets in touch I will give him a hot lunch or some similar celebration to mark the handing over.
But now to get back to business. I’m afraid I can’t help you over the book, not at any rate until next year. The books are in storage and the catalogue is missing, and although I was the second biggest contributor after King’s College, Cambridge at the recent Ipex International Printing Exhibition at the British Museum, I have mislaid the catalogue of my collection and to help you with your piece, in the foreseeable future, would be a major enterprise.
When you get back to England I will explain all this in more detail, but, for the time being, please put the idea, which is certainly a good one, in cold storage.
I am sure Playboy will leave your piece alone, unlike the Herald Tribune who badgered me for something on the transatlantic telephone for their new magazine, and then cut it to ribbons.
This is a terrible fault in American editors, both in periodicals and book publishing, and I entirely sympathise with your firm stand against having your golden words turned to lead, which seems to be their purpose. What is the object of getting an original writer to write an original piece and then taking all the originality out of it? God knows.
Again with a thousand thanks for your generosity and come over here again soon.
TO C. D. HAMILTON
16th October, 1963
My dear C.D.,
Please see the attached.
My own feeling is that we could do well with a sophisticated diary from Paris and that Sonia Orwell7 would do it well.
If you remember she tried it for us some years ago, but I don’t think she ever really got into her stride and she is a much more mature person today than she was then and much more firmly established in Paris.
The paper goes ahead splendidly and I am only slightly worried that the colour section has, by the nature of things, to contain so much art and archaeology. I will try and scratch my head for some alternative ideas, but I still think my suggestion of the great jewellers of the world would be a strong runner.
Sorry I didn’t see more of you on Thursday night [at the film premiere], but I was absolutely exhausted and crept to bed pretty early. Hope to see you at lunch with Roy next Wednesday.
TO MRS. SONIA ORWELL, 38, rue des Saints Pères, Paris, 7e
16th October, 1963
My dear Sonia,
It was lovely to see you again and now to hear from you.
Personally I think you have much to offer The Sunday Times on the lines of the old Mitford monthly diary, but all this must rest with my good friend C.D. Hamilton, the editor.
So I am sending your letter on to him with a warm recommendation and I expect in due course you will be hearing either from him or from Frank Giles.
But you should remember that recently Stephen Coulter has been writing an occasional diary and I am not sure if they will wish to disturb this arrangement.
Anyway, best of luck, and it was lovely to see you again.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
22nd October, 1963
My dear Michael,
Griffie has passed on to me your letter of October 21st and many thanks for the round figure.
Regarding Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, I really hate the idea of having to do a blurb for it as I’ve forgotten all about the series after so much time. So could you ask one of your chaps to do a draft that I can scribble on? When will the pictures be ready, by the way?
You don’t say what you think of Dickie Chopping’s picture [for You Only Live Twice] and I am longing to hear from you about it.
Many thanks for the mock-up, which I return. This is exactly as I saw it but you might perhaps consider dropping the “Obituary” as it more or less repeats the chapter head.
Some lines have been dropped from the text, but that presumably doesn’t matter.
Sorry I didn’t get around to seeing more of you both the other night [at the premiere], but I was absolutely dead beat with grinning inanely at people, and how we got seventy people into our small house I simply cannot imagine. It mildly caught fire the following week and I am not in the least surprised!
Let’s meet soon and have a tour d’horizon.
TO RICHARD CHOPPING
There had been some confusion over the copyright in Chopping’s illustrations. For a long while Fleming had thought he owned the rights, having commissioned them and, to a large degree, designed them. But as Chopping pointed out to Michael Howard, he had never assigned the copyright in any of his works.
5th November, 1963
My dear Dickie,
First of all a thousand congratulations on the new jacket. It is quite in your topmost class and Anne loves it also. You and I really are a wonderful team.
Now I am delighted that you have raised this question of copyright which had completely escaped my attention. Naturally the copyright in all the jackets remains with you though the originals are my property.
I had assumed you were being paid a copyright fee for reproductions particularly in America, but I have now talked to Michael and find that this is not so. So I have asked Michael to have the accounts gone through to see what American monies have been paid to me for the use of your jackets and to re-credit this to you instead of me.
I am so sorry this hasn’t been done before, but quite honestly both Michael and I forgot all about it. Anyway, it should come as a pleasant Christmas present!
You are quite right to have raised all this and I am delighted we shall at last get our accounts straight.
Yes, please do get the scroll a bit more scrolly if you can.
TO MICHAEL HOWARD
5th December, 1963
My dear Michael,
“You Only Live Twice”
We seem to be having the most tremendous arguments about what is a “tanka” and what is a “haiku”, and I can’t understand why somebody can’t look it up in a dictionary and find the correct answer.
But at the present moment you have certainly got it wrong by changing my “syllables” for “letters”.
If you will, as I have, consult Professor Blyth, Volume 4, 1952, you will find that “the haiku is the traditional Japanese verse of 17 syllables”. [. . .]
Regarding the mention on Page 16, line 7, of “tanka of thirty-one syllables”, which seems to have been missed in the general argumentation, I think this should also stet unless someone of high authority on either side of the Atlantic shouts me down.
I am sending copies of this to Phyllis Jackson, Victor Weybright and Playboy, and I hope we have now heard the end of Japanese poesy.
17
The Man With the Golden Gun
‘I don’t want yachts, race-horses or a Rolls Royce,’ Fleming told journalist René MacColl in February 1964. ‘I want my family and my friends and good health and to have a small treadmill with a temperature of 80 degrees in the shade and in the sea to come to every year for two months.
‘And to be able to work there and look at the flowers and fish, and somehow to give pleasure, whether innocent or illicit, to people in their millions. Well you can’t ask for more.’
It was a wistful vision of a future that Fleming knew was unlikely to materialise. By the start of the year he was in serious decline, and although Jamaica cheered him up as always, the end was written on his face. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation came to interview him at Goldeneye he
spoke with intelligence and clarity but looked appallingly unwell. So tired and drooping were his features that it was hard to believe he was only fifty-five: he might have been a good ten years older. Nevertheless, he summoned enough energy to write what he had decided would be the last Bond novel.
The Man With the Golden Gun saw 007 transported once again to Jamaica. Having left Japan, where Fleming last stranded him, he reaches Vladivostok only to be brainwashed by SMERSH. When he returns, with murder in mind, the Secret Service foils his attempt to assassinate M with a poison-gas pistol. After intensive de-programming he is given one last chance: a do-or-die mission to kill the sharpest gunman in the business, Francisco Scaramanga. A ruthless character, Scaramanga does a nasty trade in drugs, prostitution and gambling, has murdered several British agents, and is cooperating with the Soviets to disrupt the Caribbean sugar trade. Naturally, he has all the attributes of a true Bond villain: he wields a gold-plated Colt 45 that fires silver-plated bullets of solid gold; and he has three nipples.
Using the pseudonym Mark Hazard, Bond wangles his way into Scaramanga’s confidence as a personal assistant. When his cover is blown, his employer devises a colourful death on a tourist train. But Bond manages to shoot his way out of trouble, and, having killed a carriage-load of Scaramanga’s associates, pursues Scaramanga himself through the jungle, where they meet in a final, deadly duel.
When Fleming sent the manuscript to Howard and Plomer, he was fairly confident that it worked – or could work, once he had polished it up. But the usual process of refinement proved beyond him. That Easter he played a game of golf in the rain, drove home in wet clothes and caught a cold which developed into pleurisy. On further examination it was found he had blood clots in the lung. He spent a long time in hospital and then in June was sent to recuperate, once again, in Hove. Visitors were discouraged lest they raise his blood pressure, but the few who were allowed found him sitting quietly at a window, cigarette in hand and staring out to sea.
The Man with the Golden Typewriter Page 35
