The Man with the Golden Typewriter (2 page)

Fleming's efforts drew him to the attention of Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence, who, on the outbreak of war, made him his personal assistant with the rank of commander. Fleming's wartime career was one of ingenuity and daring. Although he never engaged in active combat he engineered numerous covert operations, some of which had a major impact and others – such as recruiting the assistance of black magician Aleister Crowley – did not. But they were notable for their imagination and despite various changes of command his input was considered so valuable he was retained at his post until 1945. As the war entered its final stages, his parting coup was to organise a team of commandos, 30AU, whom he called his Red Indians, to retrieve vital documents left behind by the retreating Nazi forces.

The Second World War left him with two ambitions. The first was to build a house in Jamaica, which he had visited during operations. The second was, as he declared, to write the spy story to end all spy stories. He managed the first quite swiftly, constructing a bungalow on the north coast that he named Goldeneye. Guests complained that the furniture was hard, the windows unglazed, the plumbing unpredictable and the food (cooked by his housekeeper Violet Cummings) even more so. The bedrooms were small, with cast-iron beds whose legs rested in saucers of water to keep ants at bay. Noël Coward, who built a house nearby, Firefly, thought it looked like a clinic and christened it ‘Goldeneye-nose-and-throat'. But it did have a small beach fringed by a coral reef over which Fleming hovered for hours on end with goggles and snorkel. His second goal, to become a thriller writer, would take a little longer. In the interim he found a job as Foreign Manager of the
Sunday Times
, instigating a news service called ‘Mercury' that employed ex-intelligence personnel who provided information from every corner of the world but, most valuably, from the borders of the Iron Curtain.
He retained, too, many of his espionage contacts who kept him abreast of covert activities as the Cold War gradually unfolded. His journalistic assignments for the paper would later supply inspiration and background detail for many of the Bond novels.

The terms of his contract with press baron Lord Kemsley, who owned the
Sunday Times
, were extraordinarily lenient, allowing him two months holiday every winter in Goldeneye. So, in January he would fly to New York where he caught up with old acquaintances such as Sir William Stephenson, erstwhile head of British Intelligence in North America, plus his childhood friend Ivar Bryce, a charming but wilful millionaire based in Vermont.
⁵
And from there he would fly to Jamaica, where at Goldeneye he kept open house for his friends. Among them, in 1948, was Ann,
⁶
the wife of Esmond, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, proprietor of the
Daily Mail
. She and Fleming had been conducting an on-off affair since the 1930s and by 1951 they agreed that they were quite incompatible. Whereas Fleming preferred a coterie of close male friends such as Noël Coward, Somerset Maugham, Ivar Bryce and others (mostly from the golfing or London club fraternity), Ann was a saloniste who preferred the intellectual scene. She couldn't stand Fleming's hankering after nature, activity and the open air; and he was unable to abide what he considered to be her brittle lifestyle. On which understanding they agreed to marry.

‘We are of course totally unsuited,' he wrote from Goldeneye to Ann's brother Hugo Charteris on 23 February 1952.

I'm a non-communicator, a symmetrist, of a bilious and melancholic temperament, only interested in tomorrow. Ann is a sanguine anarchist/traditionalist.

So china will fly and there will be rage and tears.

But I think we will survive as there is no bitterness in either of us and we are both optimists – and I shall never hurt her except with a slipper.

These are disjointed thoughts which I must now take into the grey valleys of the sea.

China did fly, and their marriage was never smooth. They were both unfaithful, Fleming could be particularly heartless at times, and it was perhaps only at the end that they reconciled their differences. In 1961 Fleming had a heart attack, and, although he maintained an outward appearance of vigour, mortality loomed. He became increasingly weak and died of a second heart attack in 1964 aged only fifty-six.

A short word about how this opusculum (to use one of Fleming's favourite words) has been arranged. Each chapter concentrates on a single Bond novel and follows the sequence in which they were written. To muddy the situation, however, Fleming also wrote a children's book and several non-fiction books whose creation spanned several years –
Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang
, for example, was written in 1961 but not published until 1964. Furthermore, Fleming's correspondence concerning one novel might well spread across the years when he was writing others and the more books he wrote the more this became the case. A few chronological hiccups are therefore inevitable.
⁷
As to content, some chapters are thinner while others are fuller depending on the material available (there is a particular dearth when it comes to
Thunderball
, possibly because the correspondence went missing during the legal wrangles that followed its publication). Letters
to
Fleming, as opposed to those
by
him have, with the exception of a few stand-alone sections that give both sides of the conversation, been restricted to those from his publishers and one or two close friends such as Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham, though the gist of other exchanges (where available) are supplied in the commentaries. As some of the archive material consists just of carbon copies, salutations (My Dear Michael, etc.) have been included only where they are known.

While the vagaries of Fleming's spelling have been standardised in the editorial text, these and other typewritten quirks have been retained in the letters themselves.

 

1

Casino Royale

‘I really cannot remember exactly why I started to write thrillers,' Fleming recalled in 1956. ‘I was on holiday in Jamaica in January 1951
¹
[. . .] and I think my mental hands were empty. I had finished organising a Foreign Service for Kemsley Newspapers and that tide of my life was free-wheeling. My daily occupation in Jamaica is spearfishing and underwater exploring, but after five years of it I didn't want to kill any more fish except barracudas and the rare monster fish and I knew my own underwater terrain like the back of my hand. Above all, after being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it. So, as I say, my mental hands were empty and although I am as lazy as most Englishmen are, I have a Puritanical dislike of idleness and a natural love of action. So I decided to write a book.'

Thus Fleming described the genesis of
Casino Royale.
His wife-to-be, Ann, put it more simply in her diary: ‘This morning Ian started to type a book. Very good thing.'

Fleming liked to say that
Casino Royale
wrote itself, but in fact it was the product of hard work and discipline. Every morning, for three hours, he sat at his desk and typed 2,000 words. He then put the sheets of double-spaced foolscap aside, and took the afternoon off. He repeated the process the next day, and the next, until by 18 March the book was finished. Occasionally he and Ann lit off on a spree: there was an outing to the Milk River Spa – ‘the highest radio-activity of any mineral bath in
the world', according to Fleming – and an abortive foray to shoot alligators at midnight when ‘their red eyes shine in the moonbeams'. But he always returned to the task. ‘I rewrote nothing and made no corrections until my book was finished,' he said. ‘If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired at the mistakes in grammar and style, the repetitions and the crudities. And I obstinately closed my mind to self-mockery and “what will my friends say?” I savagely hammered on until the proud day when the last page was done. The last line “The bitch is dead now” was just what I felt. I had killed the job.'

He also killed his bachelordom. He and Ann were married on 24 March 1952, with little pomp and much hilarity in Port Maria. The ensuing festivities were dear to his heart, with copious amounts of goodwill from a select guest list that included his neighbour Noël Coward. The evening was illuminated by Fleming's personal concoction: Old Man's Thing. (Take a glass bowl. Peel, but do not break, an orange and a lime. Put them in the bowl, add a bottle of white rum and light with a match.) The next day they flew to Nassau and then New York for further celebrations. At the beginning of April the newly-weds finally returned to London where they moved into Fleming's Chelsea apartment, 24 Carlyle Mansions, to be joined by Ann's children, Raymond and Fionn, plus a talking parrot called Jackie.

Amidst this new-found domesticity, Fleming pondered the manuscript. Compared to his later output
Casino Royale
had involved little research and was taken from imagination and experience. It introduced the world to agent 007, licensed to kill, whose first fictional mission was to confront a Soviet agent, Le Chiffre, and bankrupt him at the gambling tables of a small French resort named Royale-les-Eaux. The resort was based on Deauville, which Fleming had often visited, and the idea of bankruptcy by casino was one that he had deployed during the war in neutral Portugal when he played against a Nazi operative in a futile attempt to deplete the Abwehr's exchequer. There was drama, high-explosives, cocktails, secret weaponry, a car chase, torture, a double-agent heroine and, of course, the famous first line: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.' It was exotic fare for readers in post-war austerity Britain, but what really made it stand out was the immediacy and freshness of the writing.

Fleming was faintly appalled. ‘I did nothing with the manuscript,' he wrote. ‘I was too ashamed. No publisher would want it and if they did I would not have the face to see it in print. Even under a pseudonym, someone would leak the ghastly fact that it was I who had written this adolescent tripe.' Instead he busied himself with publishing matters. As a wedding present his employer, Lord Kemsley, had appointed him Managing Director of a new imprint, Queen Anne Press. He delighted in the role. After a failed attempt to acquire an unpublished book by Proust, he turned to one of Ann's friends, the acerbic novelist Evelyn Waugh, who at first agreed to a collection of reviews called
Offensive Matters
, which Fleming suggested he embellish with ‘a short introduction on the virtue of being offensive and the decline of the invective', but settled in the end for a discursion on the Middle East titled
The Holy Places
.
²
He also wrote to travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, whose study of monasticism,
A Time for Silence
, he published the following year. For both projects he used his wartime friend Robert Harling
³
as designer. Less successful was a proposal to his
Sunday Times
colleague Cyril Connolly that he produce a 10,000-word novella. In the same period he also acquired from Lord Kemsley
The Book Collector
, a respected but ailing magazine for bibliophiles which he ran with the assistance of Percy Muir, John Carter and John Hayward, the friend and muse of T. S. Eliot. The first issue under Fleming's stewardship was published by Queen Anne Press and came out that August.

Fleming was also distracted by matters of golf. He had long hankered after Noël Coward's recently vacated house White Cliffs in St Margaret's, near Dover. There was nothing exceptional about it: the wallpaper
was sun-stained, with dark patches where once there had been pictures, and repairs were needed where Coward had damaged the brickwork by removing a statue of Mercury. But it had a view of the sea, was in Fleming's favourite county, Kent, and most importantly was within easy reach of the Royal St George's, one of England's premier golf courses. After much bickering about damages he took the lease in mid-May. Only then did he muster the courage to do something with
Casino Royale
.

His approach was oblique. Over lunch at the Ivy restaurant with his friend William Plomer,
⁴
who happened also to be a reader for Jonathan Cape's publishing house, he asked him how to get cigarette smoke out of a woman once you had got it in. ‘All right,' he said. ‘This woman inhales, takes a deep lung full of smoke, draws deeply on her cigarette – anything you like. That's easy. But how do you get it out of her again? Exhales is a lifeless word. “Puffs it out” is silly. What can you make her do?'

Plomer, himself a novelist, looked at him sharply: ‘You've written a book.' Fleming pooh-poohed the idea, saying it was hardly a book, merely a
Boy's Own Paper
story, but was grateful when Plomer asked to see the manuscript. All the same, it took several months and a reminder from Plomer before he actually sent it off. ‘He forced Cape to publish it,' Fleming wrote. And it was true: although the decision was eventually carried by a majority, Plomer pushed it through in the face of strong opposition. Jonathan Cape disliked thrillers in general,
⁵
and his editorial director, Michael Howard, was repelled by this one in particular: ‘I thought its cynical brutality, unrelieved by humour, revealed a sadistic fantasy that was deeply shocking.' Howard acquiesced with an uneasy conscience, and when he met Fleming in October forbore to mention that the very idea of being associated with its publication gave him sleepless nights.

Plomer would remain Fleming's mentor throughout his literary career, providing detailed and encouraging comments. Notwithstanding his first opinion, Michael Howard also came round to the notion
of 007 – albeit his remarks were sharper and less generous than Plomer's. Together with Howard's father Wren (aka ‘Bob'), Cape's other reader Daniel George, and briefly Cape's son David, they formed a group that Fleming called the Capians, or Bedfordians (Cape was based in Bedford Square) whose input and approval he trusted implicitly. He addressed some of his most lively correspondence to them and it is fair to say that without their input the Bond books would not have been as finely tuned as they were. Others who bore the brunt included Al Hart of Macmillan in New York, Tom Guinzburg of Viking and the long-suffering Naomi Burton, his agent on the East Coast.