Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Ian Fleming

In October 1963, Evelyn Waugh spent the weekend with Ian and Ann Fleming in their new house near Sevenhampton. Waugh wrote up the occasion in his journal: “A two day visit to see what Ann has been up to. The full horror of her edifice did not appear until the next day … Ian Fleming, near death, in a woollen sweater drinking heavily the whisky forbidden him by his doctor.” Fleming was only fifty-five and suffering from a chronic heart condition. Waugh continued in the same vein a few days later in a letter to Nancy Mitford: “[Ian Fleming] looks and speaks as though he may drop dead any minute. His medical advisors confirm the apprehension.”

Fleming carried on disobeying doctors’ orders for another ten months, enduring ever-increasing ill-health. In his drawn-out demise Fleming managed to sum up much of the character of his life: contrary, foolhardy, perverse and — somehow — very English. He was looking forward to dying and didn’t see why, until that moment arrived, he should be denied his booze, cigarettes and games of golf. Interestingly enough, Fleming’s key companions in his last months were other writers: William Plomer, Alan Ross and Cyril Connolly. He and Waugh were cordial but one senses that they didn’t much like each other. Waugh — another eccentric Englishman who drank, smoked and drugged himself to an early grave — was much friendlier with Fleming’s wife, Ann, a vivacious and somewhat terrifying society hostess. I once met a female contemporary of hers and asked what Ann Fleming had been like: “One of those women who didn’t much like women,” came the reply.

Ann Fleming was the great love of Fleming’s life but by the 1960s the passion had long gone. Fleming was having an affair with a divorcée in Jamaica and Ann was dallying indiscreetly with the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, but in their brittle, wealthy, worldly way she and Fleming kept up appearances. But Waugh and Ann Fleming were disdainful of Fleming in their letters and conversation, referring to him as “Thunderbird,” Waugh, as ever, choosing to mock someone he probably would naturally envy.

For, on paper, Fleming seemed to possess everything that Waugh felt he lacked. Fleming was born (in 1908) into a rich and famous Scottish banking family. He went to Eton where he excelled as a sportsman, and then Sandhurst. He was tall, dark and vaguely handsome. After Sandhurst he followed family tradition and went into the City, becoming, in his terms, “the world’s worst stockbroker” and led a stereotypical playboy life — pretty girls, fast cars, foreign holidays. He then had a “good war” in the celebrated Naval Intelligence Division, where he was perhaps at his happiest, at the centre of a highly efficient espionage network, with the power to plot and scheme, to travel on clandestine business, to flirt with genuine danger (he accompanied the Canadians on the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942, for example). The war ended and he became a senior executive and occasional journalist on the Sunday Times. And finally came the invention of James Bond, the huge sales, the money and the movies.

Like most people, I first encountered Fleming through his famous creation. I remember, aged eleven or twelve, reading From Russia with Love with a real illicit thrill. The book was passed around my pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography. So this was what the adult world was like, we remarked to each other, utterly captivated by the now familiar blend of snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods.

The scales fall from your eyes pretty quickly but the allure of Bond and Bondiana is potent while it lasts. Bond’s world was Fleming’s fantasy: a comic strip version of a life he almost lived. But when, after his death, Fleming the man began to crop up in the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries I found my attention began to focus more on the author himself than his works. As a case study he provided rich material. To such an extent, in fact, that I have now inserted him as a minor character in my latest novel.

It’s hard to say what fascinates and intrigues about Ian Fleming. My own hunch is that it has something to do with his torments, his personal demons. At first glance he appears to be the man who has everything but who, in some way, is simultaneously fundamentally unhappy. The Fleming I write about is the Fleming of the late thirties and the war years, when the useless stockbroker turned into the avid spymaster. Notwithstanding his business ineptitude, Fleming, thanks to his inherited wealth, was able to live in some style before the war: with his specially decorated apartment, his red sportscar, his regular orders of 1,000 custom-made mono-grammed Morland cigarettes (he was a dogged sixty-a-day man). When he joined the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939 he became the assistant to its chief, Admiral John Godfrey. He was awarded an honorary rank in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and had a uniform made by his tailor. Yet when he was teased by his raffish friends about being a “chocolate sailor” he took real offence and sulked. It’s a telling anecdote, and it testifies to his insecurities, his vanity and childishness. His behaviour displays the very opposite of Bondian cool self-esteem.

And the more one reads about Fleming, as he appears in the two biographies thus far written, in his wife’s published letters and in the comments and observations made by his friends and associates, the more complex and flawed he appears. He seems to be one of those emotionally closed Englishmen, incapable of fully engaging with the women he took up with. Time and again his girlfriends complain of being used and then discarded. His seduction technique rarely varied. First the girlfriend would be invited to peruse his collection of erotica (heavy on flagellation), then a Viennese waltz would be played on the gramophone while dinner was served — kedgeree or sausages with copious alcohol — then to bed. The common complaint was that Fleming was clearly far more interested in himself than his companion.

Fleming described himself thus: “I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes rather painful splits of one’s life.” And, one might add, provides a field day for the amateur psychologist. Am I wrong in thinking that this curious blend of the infantile and the world-weary is most commonly found in a certain type of upper class Englishman? One can mention any number of soldiers and explorers, industrialists, aristocrats and politicians who all too easily fit this peculiar bill. James Bond now seems a kind of hopelessly remote role model, a Platonic dream — the juvenile defects replaced by expensive hobbies, the emotional failings by carnal ruthlessness: the ultimate form of wishful thinking.

The “hurry to get to the grave” recalls Waugh again, another man eager to meet his maker. What was it about Fleming’s gilded life that prompted this death wish? My own supposition, for what it’s worth, is that it is fostered by a sense of the bogus and the sham. “To thine own self be true” is not a bad aphorism to guide you through your life but neither Fleming nor Waugh adhered to it, creating elaborate personas to shore up the bundle of neuroses and fraught contradictions that made up their innate selves. Their taedium vitae is just that: the urge to quit this world being a sign of the huge fatigue that maintaining the pretence engenders.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of his life, Fleming so cavalierly disregarded his doctors’ orders: he knew he hadn’t long to go — his heart was failing, there were blood clots forming on his lungs — his clock was rapidly ticking down, so why not carry on eating and drinking and smoking as if he were a young man again? And this knowledge perhaps explains the new serenity that his writer friends observed in his last months, whether watching cricket with Alan Ross at Brighton or reminiscing with Cyril Connolly about pre-war dalliances in Kitzbühel. Connolly found him altogether “sadder, gentler, and wiser.” According to his wife, however, “he stared from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” Relief and release came on 11 August 1964. He was fifty-six.

2002