Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (99 page)

University was judged to be beyond his abilities and he was packed off to Sandhurst. On a weekend pass he contracted gonorrhea from a ‘hostess’ at the 43 Club in Soho (even his dose of clap had a superior ring to it), and was withdrawn by his appalled mother, medicated and, aged twenty, shuttled off to what his biographer calls a ‘finishing school for men in Kitzbühel, Austria’. It suited him. He was good at languages, good at skiing and loved abroad. This was not, alas, sufficient to get him into the Foreign Office, whose exams he failed. Family connections, and his mother’s relentless push, got him into Reuters News Agency. The hectic pace and general cynicism of a life at the forefront of breaking headlines suited him, as did the travel involved.

Ever restless and constitutionally prone to crippling boredom, he gave up Reuters for the city, which suited him not at all. One friend described him as the ‘world’s worst stockbroker’ – this at a period when competition on the floor of the exchange was not fierce. Luckily for him, unluckily for the world, war broke out and he was promptly recruited into naval intelligence, as a smart young fellow who knew German and Germans. In the Admiralty’s ‘Room 39’ it was Fleming’s job to brainstorm – coming up with stunts to win the war. He saw it as playing at ‘Red Indians’ (who, of course, invariably lost their wars). One of his brainwaves was to drop a submarine pillbox off the coast of Dieppe to keep a periscopic eye on what the Germans were up to. Few of his ideas were implemented and most were as absurd as the witch doctor in Evelyn Waugh’s
Sword of Honour
trilogy, employed by British Military Intelligence to give the Führer horrible nightmares. None the less Fleming was liked and promoted to Commander. Irritatingly, all he actually commanded was in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays. As someone privy to the genuinely war-winning facts of Ultra and Enigma, he could never go anywhere that the enemy might capture him – not even a submarine pill box off Dieppe. He saw out the war a pen-pusher and a desk warrior. It rankled.

On demobilisation he joined the Kemsley newspaper group, whose flagship was the
Sunday Times
. His job, as manager of the foreign desk, entailed ‘a little work, a lot of golf, women and lunch’, as Ben Macintyre crisply puts it. Among other unusual privileges, Fleming had three months’ holiday a year. It was in these breaks that he established his second home in Jamaica, building himself a house that he called
‘Goldeneye’. The name alluded to one of his less madcap wartime operations. While England shivered in bitter winters, fuel cuts, over-darned socks and strikes – locked in the miserable place by currency exchange controls (which, as a foreign correspondent, did not apply to Ian Fleming) – this child of fortune basked in the sun, smoking his limitless cigarettes and drinking his sundowners. In mitigation, he carried it off with style, as a junior colleague at the
Sunday Times
recalled: ‘To us young blokes on the paper then, he always seemed to have a mythological quality. We couldn’t take him quite seriously, but you had to hand it to him: we envied his whopping salary – £5,000 a year, or some £200,000 in modern money … We admired the lordly way he roared off in his Ford Thunderbird around lunch time on Friday to get in nine holes of golf before dinner while we soldiered on to the small hours of Sunday morning.’

It was not always the links that he was roaring off to. His love life flourished with numerous affairs, the most durable of which was with Ann Rothermere, wife of the
Daily Mail
proprietor. She and Fleming had a child, which died stillborn, three years before she divorced her husband in 1951, to become Ann Fleming. She was pregnant again (by Ian) at the time of the wedding in 1952. Caspar would be their only child. A woman who hobnobbed with the likes of Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh, Annie imposed a sense of inferiority on her husband which spurred him on to do something spectacular himself.

He began writing his first book at the period of their marriage.
Casino Royale
(‘pornography’, as a wholly unimpressed Annie called it) was helped into print by Fleming’s good turns to a friend. During the war, one of Fleming’s junior officers, William Plomer (in peacetime a man of letters), had made the mistake of importuning a guardsman at a railway station who – unlike others of his comrades – was not for sale. Fleming extricated Plomer from what would have been a court martial and certain jail-time. In the early 1950s, Plomer was a senior adviser to Jonathan Cape: the IOU was called in and
Casino Royale
was published by the most exclusive imprint in literary London. It was like OUP publishing
No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
The opening sentence had a peculiar resonance for the reader of 1953:

The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.

At this period pubs closed at 10 p.m. BBC TV (the only choice) ‘closed down’ at the same early hour with the ‘Queen’ and Horlicks. To remember what life was like at three o’clock in the morning most citizens would have had to cast their minds back to wartime and blackouts. James Bond would save them from that ever happening again.

Casino Royale
introduced Fleming’s 007 at a period when, following the Burgess and Maclean scandal, Britain’s secret agents seemed to be all of them homosexuals in the pay of Moscow. Bond – derived, genetically, from Bulldog Drummond – is old-fashioned English derring-do incarnate and a lady-killer. Fleming would go on to write a ‘Bond’ a year until his premature death. In the above opening scene in the French casino Bond is on his seventieth cigarette of the day and has downed enough drink to have lesser men stomach-pumped. But he still has wit and energy enough to foil the dastardly Le Chiffre – as he will, in subsequent adventures, Dr No, Blofeld and the collective evil designs of SMERSH.

Jonathan Cape’s name ensured a certain chic for
Casino Royale
, but it was not seen as anything other than higher-class pulp. Kingsley Amis devoted a considerable effort to arguing otherwise. There is, he said, ‘a power and freshness about the book which, in an age less rigidly hierarchical in its attitudes to literature, would have caused it to be hailed as one of the most remarkable first novels to be published in England in the previous thirty years.’ The Bond books were consumed massively, if not respected as Amis would have liked. They offered a shop window onto a world denied the mass of the British population. Sweets, to take a small example, only came ‘off ration’ a couple of months before
Casino Royale
’s publication – and promptly disappeared from the shelves, as the nation gorged its long-frustrated sweet tooth. Getting on for a decade after victory, life was austere and homogenised. Bond’s favoured Taittinger Blanc de Blancs Brut and hand-made Sobranie Balkans were the fantasy equivalent of Winston Smith’s Victory Gin and Victory Cigarettes in
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(i.e. 1948). In a world of utility clothes and state-manufactured soap, Bond’s cakes of
Fleur des Alpes
, and Jermyn Street shirts were another world – and a lusted-after world.

As Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett notes, the social climate had changed by the end of the 1950s, when it was increasingly possible to credit Harold Macmillan’s assertion, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ It was at this period of his career that critics began looking sharply at James Bond and none more so than Paul Johnson, in a famous diatribe in the
New Statesman
in April 1958, entitled ‘Sex, snobbery and sadism’. It opened: ‘I have just finished what is without a doubt the nastiest book I have ever read. It is a new novel entitled
Dr. No
and the author is Mr. Ian Fleming … There are three basic ingredients in Dr No, all unhealthy, all thoroughly English: the sadism of a school boy bully, the mechanical two-dimensional sex-longings of a frustrated adolescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult.’ But, as a perplexed Johnson was obliged to note, whatever else, the author was
not
‘suburban’: ‘Mr Fleming was educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and is married to a prominent society hostess, the ex-wife of Lord Rothermere …
Fleming belongs to the Turf and Boodle’s and lists among his hobbies the collection of first editions.’ Baffling.

Baffling too were the sales. Annie Fleming’s friends might scoff (they did – Fleming had once overheard them laughing uproariously at the galley proofs of
Casino Royale
) but when did Cyril, or Evelyn, sell a million in paperback? Or Paul Johnson, come to that. A feature which would become more and more interesting to commentators over the years, particularly after Fleming’s death, were the whipping scenes in his novels. Le Chiffre, for example, lays into the bare buttocks of 007 with a relish which, presumably, was rare even in the least regulated boarding houses of English public schools. Was Fleming himself a flagellomaniac? There were sensational newspaper ‘revelations’ on the subject and his own joke to Annie that after a night of love she would be drinking her cocktails ‘standing up’ for a day or two. His ‘tastes’ are rendered an in-joke in the 2006 film (the second) of
Casino Royale
:

BOND (
being tortured
): I’ve got a little itch, down there. Would you mind? (
Le Chiffre whips him again
)

BOND: No! No! No! No! To the right! To the right! (
Le Chiffre whips him again
)

BOND: Aaghh! Yes! Aarrgh! Yes! Yes! Yes. Now the whole world’s gonna know that you died scratching my balls!

It was the films, beginning with
Dr No
in 1962, which made Bond into a multimedia franchise which continues to turn over more money per annum than any other literary creation of the twentieth century, with the possible exception of the Harry Potter films. Celluloid converted what little realism the novels had (none at all, anti-Bondists like John le Carré and Len Deighton protest) into fantasia. But, manifestly, fantasy was what audiences wanted and would pay for.

The early films had an easy, 1960s knowingness (the stolen Goya on the stair at Dr No’s mansion, for example) which was in tune with a time in which 1950s austerities were being forgotten and critical standards relaxed. No more fuddy-duddy. Even Britain’s most eminent, and starchiest, film critic, Dilys Powell, approved of the early film adaptations. Fleming himself never made great claims for anything with the name ‘Ian Fleming’ on it: his books, he said, were ‘adolescent’. Be that as it may, their appeal was hugely enhanced by being, now, ‘books of the film’. Supposedly, according to Ben Macintyre, both John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald were reading Bond novels the night before the Dallas assassination.

‘Fleming,’ according to his biographer Andrew Lycett, ‘was a complex and often unhappy man.’ Physically, he was living proof that hard living was inadvisable for anyone intending to be around to collect their pension. It was not unusual for him to drink a daily bottle of gin during the war and switch to the same intake of bourbon
after it. He smoked like a chimney – through a Noël Coward-style holder in later years. He had his first major heart attack in 1961 and would die, aged only fifty-seven, after a series of them. Ill, but not quite extinct, he wrote, in his last year, the charming fable about the kind of exotic car he loved,
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
. It suggests that he could, had he lived longer, have satisfied readers even younger than adolescents. The story had originally been invented as a bedtime entertainment for Caspar. It was one of the few consolations of Fleming’s early death that he did not survive to witness the death of his son, from a self-administered drug overdose, in 1975.

That’s the way I’d like to be remembered – as a storyteller. A good storyteller.

Louis L’Amour holds the title of bestselling author ever of Westerns. By the time of his death, 105 of his titles were in print and it was estimated some 200 million copies of his novels had been sold – the more surprising since he did not begin writing until his mid-thirties and had no great success until a few years after that. L’Amour was born ‘Louis Dearborn LaMoore’, the youngest of seven children, in Jamestown, North Dakota, where his father was a ‘large animal’ (i.e. principally horse) veterinarian. L’Amour claimed French-Irish pioneer ancestry and recorded that ‘I am probably the last writer [of Westerns] who will ever have known the people who lived the frontier life.’ In 1923, during the post-war Depression, and following the arrival of the automobile, which deprived veterinary surgeons of much of their business – and any lingering tang of the ‘frontier life’ – the LaMoores sold up and drifted to the southwest. Louis left school at fifteen (in later life he declared himself to be ‘self-educated’) and embarked on what he called his ‘knockabout’, or ‘yondering’ years – which he patently romanticised in later life. He was, as he protested, a ‘good storyteller’.

What is clear is that he saw the world. Between 1923 and 1941 he claimed to have been, among other manly things: a cattle-skinner, hay-cutter, circus elephant handler, lumberjack, professional prize-fighter (winning, he claimed, fifty-one out
of fifty-nine fights), a rod-riding hobo and an ocean-going seaman. He claimed also to have ridden with Tibetan bandits. He had early ambitions to be a poet, and it was for verse that he devised the pen name ‘L’Amour’.

In 1942, after the outbreak of war, L’Amour joined the US Army and saw active service, as a lieutenant, in the European campaign. On demobilisation in 1946, he settled in Los Angeles, where he began seriously writing short stories for pulp magazines. Before the war he had published a few pieces, including hard-boiled crime and historical romance, as well as Westerns. Between 1950 and 1953 he published four ‘Hopalong Cassidy’ novels (a franchise exploited by many hands, but originated by Clarence E. Mulford in 1904) under the pseudonym ‘Tex Burns’. He was writing a story a week, for the standard $100, and living in friends’ spare rooms.