For Your Eyes Only (15 page)

Though he may have kicked off the Bond books by describing the rank stench of a casino in the early hours of the morning, Fleming loved to gamble and so, of course, does Bond. Again, for most contemporary readers, the evocation of a casino, however sweaty, brought glamour, money and the faint whiff of sin. Gambling in casinos or any ‘common gaming house' had been illegal in Britain (except in private clubs) since 1854, and its gambling laws would not be relaxed until 1960. Fleming had developed a taste for the card table as a young man about town before the war, when he and his more rakish friends would sometimes fly to Le Touquet or Deauville for a weekend of
gambling, golf and girls. Those experiences, and his wartime visit to the casino at Estoril in Portugal, would help inform the memorable scenes in
Casino Royale
. Fleming was fascinated by the theory of gambling and the mentality of the wealthy and reckless gambler: as a young man he brushed shoulders with the so-called Greek Syndicate, a group of ship owners who ran the casino at Deauville. The syndicate's most remarkable dealer was Nicholas Zographos, a character whose stony coolness of temperament matched that of Bond himself. Fleming, unlike Bond, was a cautious gambler, and often an unsuccessful one. Bridge was his game, and although he developed into a good player, he lacked the patience and mathematical precision to master the art beyond amateur competence. At first he played at Boodles, and later at the Portland Club, where the stakes were higher: the two clubs would be amalgamated to form the ‘Blades Club' in
Moonraker
, in which Fleming devotes more than sixty pages of intense and vivid description to the game.

Indeed, Fleming became something of an advocate for gambling. For the
Sunday Times
he wrote an article entitled ‘How to Win at Roulette with only £10', which was turned down on the grounds that its racy tone might not sit well with the more prim consciences among the newspaper's readership. But it was precisely the sense of indulging in forbidden fruits that gave Bond, the best gambler in the British secret service, such cachet. In
journalism, as in fiction, Fleming knew well how to conjure up ‘the noisy abracadabra of the roulette table', a heady species of magic most of his readers could barely imagine. By setting scenes in casinos (a literary device borrowed from Somerset Maugham), Fleming transported his readers away from the bomb-scarred cities of Britain to a brighter, sweeter and thrillingly degenerate world. In a semi-serious article for the
Spectator
, entitled ‘If I Were Prime Minister' (a fairly alarming proposition), Fleming suggested that the Isle of Wight be turned into a huge pleasure island, where ‘frustrated citizens of every class could give rein to the basic instincts for sex and gambling which have been crushed through the ages'. (Given his earlier suggestion that the Isle of Wight be made French during the war, one wonders what Fleming had against this blameless island.)

Fleming's other main recreational hobby was golf. It may seem strange, in an age when golf is one of the most democratic and widely played games in the world, that at the time when Bond was first climbing into his plus-fours the sport held a peculiar, elite glamour. Fleming first played golf with his grandmother, took up the game at prep school, and played until the end of his life (indeed, a cold caught playing golf led to his final illness). It was a game that gave him the purest and simplest pleasure, and most weekends he could be found on one of Britain's courses: Gleneagles, Cooden in Sussex, and most famously at Royal
Saint George's in Kent, which would become the fictional Royal Saint Mark's in
Goldfinger
. Golf offered Fleming the sort of male companionship he often craved, the opportunity to spend a few hours in the open air with some like-minded, clubbable friends, a modicum of exercise followed by an immodicum of drinks. Once again, his enthusiasm outpaced his ability: he played off a handicap of nine (so does Bond), but developed an inhibiting ‘flat swing' (so does Bond). Agent 007 is happy to cheat his way to victory in
Goldfinger
, something his creator would never have done (even if his opponent was already doing so), but Fleming was also happy to gamble on the outcome: when he was young, the bet was a mere £1; as he grew older and richer, the stakes rose to a hefty £50 a round or more. Fleming never became a golf bore, because while he was passionate about the game he never took it too seriously. Sometimes the wager was frivolous – say, a pair of monogrammed pyjamas. He scandalised the stuffier members of the Old Etonian Golfing Society by presenting it with an unusual prize cup: a chamber pot inscribed with the words ‘The James Bond All Purpose Grand Challenge Vase'. He was also capable of mocking his own golfing pretensions, as in an article entitled ‘Nightmare among the Mighty' which he wrote for the
Sunday Times
about his participation and unexpected success in a pro-celebrity tournament.

Swimming had been a passion of Fleming's since
boyhood, a form of relaxation he could enjoy even more after the acquisition of Goldeneye. Fleming was a strong swimmer, and the sea had always fascinated him. He passed his halcyon memories of childhood bucket-and-spade holidays on to Bond, who reminisces about the ‘painful grit of wet sand between young toes when the time came for him to put his shoes and socks on, of the precious pile of sea-shells and interesting wrack on the sill of his bedroom window . . . of the small crabs scuttling away from the nervous fingers groping beneath the seaweed in rockpools'. This is the closest Bond ever gets to nostalgia. With the help of Jacques Cousteau, Fleming glimpsed the extraordinary underwater riches, and his daily swim and snorkelling along the reef at Goldeneye became part of a beloved ritual. He made an in-depth study of the fish in the lagoon, and bound it in black leather. Though no fan of the hunt on land, he chased barracuda with a spear gun in the shallower waters, and once went shark hunting, using a dead animal carcass as bait, an experience he described as the most exhilarating of his life.

Ian Fleming spent much of his life behind a desk – at the Admiralty, at the
Sunday Times
and at Goldeneye – and the rest of his time trying to escape from the confines of a desk-bound life. He was a permanently restless man, constantly on the alert for the next exciting or interesting location he might like to visit, and bring into his fiction. Fleming was always a dedicated tourist and, usually, someone
else paid the travel bills: Reuters in his youth, the Royal Navy during the war, and Kemsley Newspapers in later life. This restlessness and love of movement was transmitted directly to Bond, who is constantly trying to prise the ‘blubbery arms of the soft life' from his throat and beat back the boredom of London life by hitting the road on his next assignment. Once again, Bond's travels to distant and exotic locations, on an apparently limitless expense account, represented a level of expenditure and freedom beyond the dreams of most readers. Even though foreign holidays and air travel were becoming a possibility for ordinary people, restrictions on the amount of money one was allowed to take out of the country still made foreign travel exceedingly difficult for most.

Bond travels to America and the Caribbean, to Switzerland and the Seychelles, to Turkey, Canada, Japan and France. Usually he travels by plane – air travel in the 1950s was expensive, luxurious and time-consuming – and reflects: ‘If I ever married I would marry an air hostess.' Wherever he goes, the weather is wonderful. ‘The sun is always shining in my books,' Fleming remarked. Conversely, in Bond's Britain, the weather is reliably horrible, cold, windy and miserable, or else unpleasantly sweltering. This is the place that Bond and his readers escape from. It is easy, and even a touch galling, to imagine Fleming sitting at his desk in Jamaica, opining on the horrors of an English winter
while looking out over the azure waters of his private tropical lagoon. ‘Yes,' reflects Major Smythe in
Octopussy
, ‘[Jamaica] was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their Spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst weather for thirty years.'

If the books occasionally read like travel brochures, that is because Fleming regarded himself, in some measure, as a travel agent, a proselyte for the delights of foreign parts with a duty to reveal new and different worlds to his readers. His particular powers of observation and description made him a natural travel writer. He actively promoted Jamaica as a holiday destination for sun-starved Britons, declaring: ‘English people should become Empire-minded for their holidays.' Only one Bond book,
Moonraker
, the third in the series, is set entirely in Britain. The evocation of Kent reflected Fleming's love of that county, but the decision to restrict Bond to home turf prompted complaints from some readers keen to be transported elsewhere; thereafter, Fleming sent Bond abroad in every novel.

Wherever Bond travels, Fleming has travelled first. As with all his writing, the fiction is firmly anchored to facts, people and scenes he had experienced at first hand. He wrote with his travel brochures, notebooks, postcards and other travel memorabilia on the desk beside him. Sometimes he disguised and fictionalised reality, but often he did not.
‘I see no point in changing the name of the Dorchester to the Porchester,' he said. At times, the detail is so precise that Bond begins to sound like a travel adviser from the AA: watch out, warns 007, for ‘the dangerous crossroads where Le Touquet's quiet N38 meets the oily turbulence of the major N1'. This is the travel equivalent of the Amherst Villiers supercharger in Bond's Bentley, the
sauce mousseline
on his turbot, and Domino's attractive limp: the devil, and the delight, is in the detail.

Fleming's taste for travel was established in his youth with his sojourns in Europe, surely exacerbated by Peter's success as a travel writer, then consolidated by his wartime wanderings, and finally thoroughly expanded by his indulgent employers in peacetime. The
Sunday Times
gave Fleming a virtual licence to travel at will, a long rein that would be unheard of in newspapers today, and was pretty rare even then. In 1959, the features editor, Leonard Russell, approached Fleming with the sort of suggestion that newspaper editors, in my experience, never make: would Fleming care to take a five-week, all-expenses-paid trip around the world, to visit the globe's most thrilling cities? Astonishingly, Fleming apparently needed persuading to take up this offer. ‘Surely you want to pick up some material for your stories,' said Russell. ‘It's a wonderful opportunity.'

Fleming's ‘Thrilling Cities' world tour in 1959 was a remarkable odyssey. The first leg took him to Hong Kong
(‘modern comfort in a theatrically oriental setting'), Macau, to gamble in a nine-storey house of pleasure, and to Tokyo, where he composed haikus with geisha girls. In Hong Kong he linked up with the
Sunday Times
Asia correspondent, Richard Hughes, a large and ebullient Australian (and part-time spy) who was doyen of the city's foreign press corps, and in Tokyo he was guided by another journalist, ‘Tiger' Saito. As with Nazim Kalkavan, his Turkish guide to Istanbul in 1956, Fleming would repay his local guides by granting them immortality in
You Only Live Twice
, as Richard Lovelace ‘Dikko' Henderson, the Australian stationed in Japan, and Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service. Fleming was no culture-vulture; his requirements were entertainment, comfort and colour: ‘No politicians, museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies.' He wanted to experience casinos, restaurants and brothels, the high life, night life and low life, the glamour and, of course, the girls: ‘In the East, sex is a delightful pastime totally unconnected with sin,' he declared. But then, sin had never been much of a preoccupation for Fleming.

The plane from Tokyo to Hawaii caught fire and nearly crashed. In Los Angeles, he visited the head of police intelligence to bone up on the local mafia scene, and in Las Vegas he made $100 on the slot machines and stole three ashtrays as souvenirs. In Chicago, he broke his own no-museums rule and visited that city's fine collection of
Impressionist art, but he also found time to see a striptease (‘positively exquisite boredom') and the site of the St Valentine's Day Massacre. New York, his final destination and a city he had always loved, proved, on this occasion, to be a disappointment, no doubt compounded by travel fatigue after more than a month on the road and his mounting ill health. Fleming complained that the city was in thrall to television and tranquillisers, and in a later Bond short story he grumbled that the best restaurants had been colonised by a new ‘expense account aristocracy' – a criticism which, given his own elevated position within that particular caste, was pretty rich. Some of this jaundiced attitude to America would reappear in
You Only Live Twice
, when Bond reflects on Britain's fast-diminishing global role and Tiger Tanaka hits out at the new American superpower dominating East and West: ‘Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lightings.' Just a few months later, Fleming would repeat the ‘Thrilling Cities' experience with a whistle-stop canter through selected European cities, including Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Geneva (where he met Charlie Chaplin) and Monte Carlo.

These trips would result in a successful and popular newspaper series covering thirteen cities in all. ‘Thrilling Cities' was published in book form in 1963, but beyond that the extended double journey furnished Fleming with vast amounts of contemporary material for his novels. Ann
remarked acidly that she did not see how Ian could be thrilled by any city, since he never stayed long enough to see anything. But that was the way Ian travelled, Fleming wrote and Bond lived: impressionistically, thrillingly and very fast.

Travel, golf, swimming, gambling, reading, book-collecting: these were all, to some extent, the habits of a solitary man. The boy who had eschewed team games at Eton in favour of athletics remained a solo player all his life. The character traits that made him shy away from commitment to women were also those that drove him to pursue, alone, the things that most fascinated him. This surely also explains why, in that explosion of creativity in the last years of his life, he was able to devote himself utterly to the most solitary and lonely occupation of all: writing.