In one of the most famous scenes in the history of cinema, Ursula Andress wades ashore on a Caribbean beach with a knife in her belt, singing “Underneath the Mango Tree.” Then she meets the dashing secret agent James Bond, and a franchise is born which lives to this day. But the millions who watched Dr No never knew that the inventor of James Bond, Ian Fleming, was lying prone in the nearby sand, staying humbly out of camera shot. Just before Miss Andress walked up the beach, the film’s director, Terence Young, had screamed at Fleming and two friends, who were roaming around the set, “Lie down, you bastards!” Of course, they did as they were told. Celluloid legend ranks far above human fact. It would never have done for the real Fleming to appear in his own fevered fiction. At the moment when his rather peculiar creation was about to become a strange global fantasy of bravado and glamor, Fleming did not look like an advertisement for the supposedly glamorous life with which his name will be forever linked. He was finally succumbing to his daily consumption of seventy cigarettes, supplemented by several generous measures of gin. He had recently suffered a heart attack, and one old friend remarked that he had as a result become a “strange wreck.” As the Bond legend exploded into mass audiences, total celebrity, and colossal heaps of money, Fleming was dying horribly young, his world reduced to the golf course, his personal life a miserable mess.
I would much rather not write about these sad, pathetic, and perhaps sordid events. Fleming’s miserable, even nasty marriage—and the pitiable, horrible fate of his only son—lower the spirit and serve no purpose that I can see, except perhaps to warn us of how we all live a very short distance from the nearest entrance to Hell. It does us no good to dwell on the faults of others when we should surely be examining our own. Yet here, from the mighty presses of HarperCollins, emerges yet another life of Ian Fleming, written by a first-rate biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare. Of course, you cannot really discuss Fleming without at least touching on the aimless dreariness of his life (I have deliberately left out some of the better-known miseries. They are quite public enough). Yet I do not think this is the book’s purpose. There are already lives of Fleming by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995). I should have thought that was quite enough. Even so, here is another one. You might think we were dealing here with a great war leader, the last of the Impressionist painters, or at least a Nobel Prize winner. But alas, as I suspect a harshly realistic Fleming would himself concede if he were available to be asked, this is the life story of a six-cylinder cad and rotter whose reputation rests on a small number of indifferent bits of pulp fiction which very few people now read, and which nobody at all will read thirty years from now.
I re-read one of those books, Moonraker, to refresh my memory. It reminded me of the blatant, shameless Bulldog Drummond adventures I read as a schoolboy. The writing is mostly good basic storytelling, uncluttered and possessed of that intangible power to make the reader keep going. There is a monstrous, hideous villain, obviously foreign and obviously villainous, yet undetected till the last moment. The hero behaves with such incredible repeated stupidity that he nearly gets the beautiful woman killed, is repeatedly foiled when he need not have been, and can only save the day at the absolutely last second. None of it has the slightest connection with real secret work. Fleming’s preoccupations with gambling, food, and drink slow things down from time to time. Is there any subject more boring to the non-gambler than cards? Even a storyteller of genius, such as Simon Raven, cannot make it interesting. And what is the point of that ultra-British supercharged Bentley if it cannot overtake the villain’s Teutonic Mercedes on a decent, twisting British road? Moonraker was perfectly good, of its kind, and I enjoyed bits of it, but it has little to do with the films that were loosely based on these works, not that I liked them any better.
What is the point of a biography anyway? The annals of the mighty are part of history, with the tiny, scruffy details and grubby crumpled linen of the subject’s life overshadowed by battles and massacres and mountains of skulls or by great political or cultural triumphs. If such works are any good, they show us the tiny, lonely figures peeping out from behind the enormous monuments they left behind. But the annals of the not-so-mighty are a problem. What did they actually do? We know that Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway are important writers. But are they important people? Must we dwell on every corner of their existence, every unmade bed, every drink in every bar, every betrayal? Some lives are works of art in themselves, so intensely and brilliantly lived that they shine out as examples of how to live, or (equally likely) how not to. But for most of us, plodding tediously through our days, eating, falling ill, failing, leaving the housework undone, mistreating others, running out of money, breaking promises, working for terrible employers, there is no theme and we are neither warnings nor beacons of achievement. Biographies in this case are like that rather credible vision of Hell in which the damned soul, impaled on a large spit and rotating above a fierce fire, is compelled, as he sizzles, to watch perpetual audiovisual recordings of all his most embarrassing moments, in front of a large audience of his enemies and, even more painfully, of his former admirers. Or, as it says in the ninetieth Psalm: “Thou hast set our misdeeds before thee: and our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.”
I cannot say how many times, during Nicholas Shakespeare’s account of the life of Ian Fleming, I wondered what this book was for, whom it benefited, and why it had been written. There is nothing wrong with it as a piece of work. The research is diligent and thorough, obviously the fruit of conscientious hard work and patience. The volume is handsomely bound. The storytelling is excellent and well ordered. But I have seldom been so glad to finish a book, which had sat for some weeks by my chair radiating gloom into the room. Each evening, I took it up like a piece of school homework, knowing that I would be sunk in melancholy by the time I closed it and went to bed. And so it was.
Not out of unkindness, but to show what I mean, I shall summarize some of the early pages. Fleming, son of a reasonably wealthy family but robbed of his father by the 1914–18 war, goes to Eton and hates it, breaks his nose in a sporting accident, does badly at his lessons while excelling at sports. Here there is quite a bit of stuff (this recurs) about how he lived in the shadow of his elder brother Peter, who would for much of Ian Fleming’s life be a more successful and famous writer and would crown his life by marrying the lovely actress Celia Johnson, who seems to have been as delightful in private as she was on stage and screen. Ian, meanwhile, is chucked out of England’s grandest school, probably after an unsuccessful tryst with a girl called Pearl, in Reading, the site of Oscar Wilde’s famous jail but otherwise perhaps the most prosaic town in southern England. Then it is time for an attempt at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, in those days the resort of the less intellectual members of the upper class. He fails there too, meanwhile catching a rather rude disease. Well, look, young men at this time of life can get into a bit of a mess, as who should know better than I, and Fleming was one of those to whom this happened.
The years after the First World War were not a good time for the English upper crust, whose male members often found they had too little money for the lives they had been brought up to expect. They also learned that they were hopeless with modern women. They were often twisted by ghastly schools full of canes and pederasts—and sometimes of pederasts wielding canes. Interestingly Fleming’s life borders briefly on Cold Cream, the marvelous memoir by Ferdinand Mount, who recounts an unintentionally hilarious weekend spent with Ian Fleming’s brother Peter. Pages in both books are employed in describing shiftless, drink-soaked, and largely purposeless lives without shape or structure, and with little moral guidance despite a vestigial Christianity in the background. In this era Ian Fleming could easily have been played on screen by George Sanders, the ultimate cad of the inter-war cinema, best remembered for his role as the slippery, charming, and immoral Jack Favell in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Favell wants to be a gentleman, speaks like one, dresses like one—but must make his thin crust by selling cars he cannot afford to people he envies. Fleming’s position was not far off this.
Malcolm Muggeridge, after reading John Pearson’s biography of Fleming in 1966, wrote to Pearson to say that “My opinion, that Ian’s life was one of the most squalid, unillumined ever lived, was confirmed,” and added, “Only one word of warning from one who likes you and admires your writing—don’t you get destroyed by Bond’s ghost as Ian did by his creation. Remember, he’s the Devil.” And perhaps he is.
Fleming’s mother appears to have been so ghastly that it is tempting to blame her for much of this, but what of it? Many with terrible mothers manage to do quite well in life. Fleming’s later inter-war career as a shoveler of high-speed news at Reuters and as an almost client-free stockbroker was pretty grim, however hard Shakespeare tries to make his ill-paid Reuters servitude glamorous and dramatic. And then came his wartime years in the Department of Naval Intelligence in London. Fleming’s foes have said that he spent his war mostly superintending “in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays.” But Shakespeare strives mightily to portray this period as noble and crucial to the war effort. I was not there. I cannot possibly know. But I struggle to accept his version. Much tripe is talked about intelligence departments at the best of times. David Cornwell (John le Carré) has done a great deal to counter this piffle by describing—especially in The Looking Glass War—the actual banality and fantasy of much real spy work, and the dim stupidity of those who often control it. Cornwell himself at one stage concluded that Fleming was a “substantial fantasist.” As for his supposedly key post-war role as foreign manager at the Sunday Times, let us hear the view of Frank Giles, later the paper’s editor. He mocked Fleming’s military-style yellow map of the world, adorned with flashing lights to mark the locations of his correspondents as “a fair load of old bullshit.”
One of the most embarrassing things about Britain’s recent history is how undistinguished it is after the great triumph of the Finest Hour in 1940. The “department” in which Fleming worked sounds grand. His eventual rank (of Commander in the “Wavy Navy,” as the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve was known, thanks to its curly rank badges) sounds impressive. But there seems to me to be little evidence of anything other than a reasonably competently driven desk. Shakespeare, who must have been tempted to leave out a lot of this sort of thing, but scrupulously includes it, quotes the dismissive conclusion of one acquaintance that Fleming was a “self-invented secret service star.” He is commendably ready to quote many others whose view of Fleming is similarly scornful or dismissive. I suspect Shakespeare wishes to emphasize the grandeur, importance, and intrepid nature of Ian Fleming because of what must come next: his emergence as one of the greatest celebrities of the age.
And this, eventually and after much dismal detail of his private life, is of course thanks to the creation of James Bond, first in print and then on film. But, as one who knew him in wartime days concluded, Fleming was not in fact a James Bond sort of person. Nor did the original books have all that much to do with the cinematic Bond as he developed. Fleming is important only because Bond is important. Shakespeare explains this significance all too well, calling Secret Agent 007 “a balm for a demoralised imperial power on its uppers.” Fleming’s hero, he tells us, “has evolved into an immaculate agent of escapism. The lower the sun has sunk on the empire that Bond was born into, the more radiant his glow.”
The high point of the Bond fantasy was the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, in which the late queen herself took part in a stunt, pretending to parachute into the stadium alongside an actor playing James Bond. We were all supposed to love it. I hated it, seeing in my mind’s eye grainy old films of the Grand Fleet at sea, of coronations and royal funerals, of the quiet, unshowy men and women who had actually lived in the times when my country was properly great. How could the queen have endorsed this drivel? How could we have exchanged that for this? Worse, how could we be pleased to have done so? Perhaps Bond is the devil.
