Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (19 page)

More widely,
Casino Royale
tries to reflect these changed times of diminished British power. Bond needs to be bailed out by Leiter, his CIA contact, when the gambling goes astray. Leiter slips him an envelope containing thirty-two million francs, labelled ‘Marshall Aid’. Bond is able to return the money later, but comments, ‘That envelope was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me … talk about a friend in need.’ Similarly, Bond is in fact saved by a Russian
đeus ex machina,
rather than by his own efforts (as would almost always be the case in later books).

But however diminished the status of Britain, and its intelligence services,
Casino Royale
still depicts Britain in general and Bond in particular as being in the front line of the Cold War against the Russians, just as Buchan’s Richard Hannay had once been against the Germans. Even though the action takes place in France, French operative Mathis is clearly subservient to Bond. The American Felix Leiter is also ‘under the orders’ of the British. As Leiter confides, Washington’s pretty sick we’re not running the show . . .’

Felix Leiter is a combination of two of Ian’s friends. Felix was Ivar Bryce’s middle name, and Leiter came from Tommy Leiter, a mutual
friend from a rich Chicago family. Tommy was a hopeless drunk, but his wife Marion, known as ‘Oatsie’, was a spirited Southern lady who struck up a strong and lasting friendship with Ian that would have important consequences. The Leiters had a house in Jamaica at Reading, in the hills overlooking Montego Bay, near the Stephensons.

Leiter appeared as Bond’s American sidekick in five of the novels, and would be played, somewhat confusingly, by eight different actors in the later Bond films. His close and friendly relationship with Bond represents an optimistic, or even fantastic, model for Britain’s relationship with the United States. Leiter’s role is to supply Bond with technical support, hardware and muscle, as well as money. Bond – and by implication Britain – provides the leadership, intelligence and daring.

But as he recovers from his torture, Bond experiences a minicrisis, complaining that ‘History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing places.’ We are fighting communism, he tells Mathis, but fifty years ago the ‘brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that’. He even goes as far as to pronounce: ‘this country right or wrong business is getting a little out of date’, a subversive doubt never expressed by Bond again.

But it is only a brief glimpse into the Le Carré-ish world of complicated disloyalties and the Cambridge spies. Although the plot is about a traitor in the British Secret Service, there is nothing political or ambiguous about Vesper’s motives for betraying her country. Instead she is trapped by love and by the sheer nastiness of the opposition, who have tortured her Polish lover – an RAF wartime hero – and threatened him with retribution if she does not cooperate.

Le Chiffre himself, because of his extreme cruelty, simplifies the murky moral landscape of the Cold War (so different to the certainties of Britain’s fight in the Second World War), and thereby resolves
Bond’s doubts about his career, as he explains: Le Chiffre ‘was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose,’ Bond concludes. ‘By his evil existence … he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist’. It’s a manifesto for the Bond villain figure, who would become over time far more outlandish and extreme, and therefore fulfil the ‘vital purpose’ of clarifying right from wrong even more effectively. So although
Casino Royale
has a moral landscape with more ‘grey areas’ than any other Bond book, it ultimately hopes to reassure its British readers about their country’s rectitude as well as its status and role in the world.

In spite of Ian’s writing, and Ann’s pregnancy, their involvement in the burgeoning north-coast social life continued. On 27 February there was another cocktail party at Sir Harold and Lady Mitchell’s Prospect Great House in Ocho Rios, ‘one of the highlights of the north coast season’, as the
Gleaner
reported. Lady Mitchell, ‘in vivid red, was a busy hostess’, welcoming among her guests Ann (‘wearing a cream creation’) and Ian, the Brownlows, Lord and Lady Graham and Lord and Lady Mansfield. The last, the paper continued, ‘in strawberry pink was obviously delighted to be back in Jamaica … Guests had a glimpse of the garden, gay with roses, scarlet salvias and hibiscuses of every shade. Bowls of flowers gilded the rooms, blending easily with the old cedar paneling.’

When not partying, Ann and Ian were ‘asleep by 10.30 and bathing at sunrise, writing, painting, shooting, eating and snoozing for the rest for the day’, as Ann wrote to her brother Hugo ‘from the Lotus Islands’. ‘It is frighteningly agreeable.’ Ian described it as ‘a marvelous honeymoon among the hummingbirds and barracudas’.

Ann’s divorce became absolute on Monday 24 March. She and Ian married the same day at Port Maria town hall. There were only two witnesses: Noël Coward, and his secretary Cole Lesley. Coward
had warned Violet, ‘I shall wear long elbow gloves and give the bride away. I may even cry a little at the sheer beauty of it all.’ In fact, according to Lesley, ‘We took our duties very seriously; wore ties (unheard of for Noël in Jamaica) with formal white suits, our pockets full of rice, and got to the Town Hall early. We attracted a crowd of six and a smiling though toothless black crone who entertained us with some extremely improper calypsos, including one called “Belly Lick”.’ (Lyrics include the line: ‘Drop your pants and lie down’. Fleming refers to the song in his Jamaica novel,
The Man with the Golden Gun.
)

Coward, who saw himself as the matchmaker, having assisted during Ann’s previous adulterous trips to Jamaica, remembered Ann and Ian at their wedding as ‘surprisingly timorous’. Fleming wore his usual nautical belted blue linen shirt with blue trousers. Ann, four months pregnant and beginning to show, was in a silk dress copied from a Dior design by a local Port Maria seamstress. Coward noticed that she was shaking so much the dress fluttered. ‘It was an entirely hysterical affair,’ he later wrote.

Inside the parochial office, the first thing they all saw was ‘an enormous oleograph of Churchill scowling down on us with bulldog hatred’. Once married by the registrar, Mr L. A. Robinson, they headed for Blue Harbour for strong martinis, then back to Goldeneye for a special wedding supper prepared by Violet. Coward remembered it as particularly bad: the black crab, which ‘can be wonderful to eat if you have a good cook, but Ian didn’t have a good cook’, ‘tasted just like eating cigarette ash’. To make things worse, Violet then brought out ‘a slimy green wedding cake, and dusky heads peered round the door to make sure we ate it. Ian had to because he was directly in line of sight, but later we took the cake outside and buried it so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings.’ The evening ended with a punch of Fleming’s own creation – white rum poured on citrus peel then ignited.

The next day, the newly-weds motored to Montego Bay to stay a night at Sunset Lodge before flying to Nassau, then on to New York.

Heavily pushed by Ian’s brother Peter and his friend William Plomer, the finished manuscript for
Casino Royale
was accepted for publication by Jonathan Cape, for whom Plomer worked as a scout. Ian had wanted to dedicate the book to Ann, but she replied, ‘Surely one doesn’t dedicate books of this sort to people.’ The space for the dedication remained empty.

On 12 August, Ann gave birth, after a difficult Caesarean, to a 91b 4oz baby boy, Caspar. She spent the next two weeks in hospital, with ‘tubes performing every physical function’. Her doctors advised her to have no more babies, ‘rather strongly, which is depressing’. You have been wonderfully brave and I am very proud of you,’ Ian wrote to her. ‘I do hope darling Caspar has made it up to you a little. He is the most
heavenly child and I know he will grow up to be something wonderful because you have paid for him with so much pain. Goodnight my brave sweetheart.’ A month later, Ann was still having nightmares about long red rubber tubes, and was weeping continuously.

Caspar’s godparents were to be Cecil Beaton, Anthony Eden’s wife Clarissa (a close friend of Ann’s), Ian’s brother Peter, and Noël Coward. Ann explained in a letter to a friend that they thought Noël would be offended if not asked, ‘as he considers himself responsible for the whole thing’. She soon regretted it, writing to Beaton in September about a visit from Coward: ‘He was quite delightful for the first hour … and then he suddenly became so vulgar and dull that I longed to cancel the G-parent arrangement and be frightfully rude to him; my only false relationships are with him and Rosamond Lehmann and I cannot extricate myself from either.’

On 13 April 1953,
Casino Royale
was published as a hardcover for 10s. 6d. The first print run of just over 4,700 copies sold out in a month. A second print run also sold out, as did a third of 8,000 copies. It was respectable enough for Cape quickly to offer Fleming a deal for a further three books.

The jacket of
Casino Royale,
designed by Fleming himself, is noticeably restrained, particularly in comparison with the garish girl-straddling-gun covers that would feature on the later Pan paperbacks. Indeed,
Casino Royale
was marketed as quality ‘literary’ spy fiction, which explains why it was given notices in places like the highbrow
Times Literary Supplement.
Most reviewers assumed the novel was for the ‘knowing reader’ who
would pick up the parodic elements. During the climactic moment, Le Chiffre tells Bond that ‘The game of Red Indians is over … This is not a romantic adventure story in which the villain is finally routed and the hero is given a medal and marries the girl. Unfortunately these things don’t happen in real life.’

This is one of a number of curious moments, repeated at least once in all the novels, when Fleming suddenly gives the reader a ‘knowing look’. In
Dr No,
the villain tells Bond that he has ‘been reading too many novels of suspense. Your little speech reeked of grease-paint and card-board.’ In
Diamonds are Forever,
Fleming’s minor villain Pissaro ‘looked like a gangster in a horror-comic’. The heroine of
The Spy Who Loved Me,
on hearing of Bond’s latest adventure, exclaims: ‘I could hardly believe it. It was like something out of a thriller.’ In ‘Quantum of Solace’, by which time Fleming’s stories were appearing as a cartoon strip in the
Daily Express,
Bond ponders that his duties are ‘the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper’. And there are many other examples. This self-awareness and self-deprecation are central to the Bond novels and to the wider Bond phenomenon. In a copy of one of his books sent to his novelist friend Paul Gallico, Fleming wrote: ‘To Paul, who has always seen the joke.’ Perhaps this self-consciousness prevents Fleming from being considered a truly great thriller writer, but it has ensured his longevity.

As a journalist, Fleming was well placed to encourage reviews of the book. His own newspaper, the
Sunday Times,
declared him ‘the best new thriller writer since Eric Ambler’. Although there were complaints about the graphic torture scene, most reviews were favourable. In the
Daily Telegraph,
John Betjeman declared that ‘Ian Fleming has discovered the secret of narrative art … the reader had to go on reading.’ Alan Ross in the
TLS
called the novel ‘an extremely engaging affair’, with his greatest praise for the ‘high poetry with which he invests the green baize lagoons of the casino
tables’. The
Manchester Guardian
called it ‘a first rate thriller … with a breathtaking plot’.

Ann’s brother Hugo, who had ambitions as a novelist himself, was unimpressed, telling his sister Mary Rose that ‘Ian’s thriller starts well but ends as the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen in print – torture such as Japs and Huns eschewed as not cricket. I always knew he was neurotic and tangled.’