Ian Fleming
The Complete Man
Nicholas Shakespeare
Harvill Secker 2023
When The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond book in the canon of fourteen, was published in 1962, it proved to be commercially less successful than its predecessors. Ian Fleming told Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs that this was most likely due to the fact that he had departed from his usual formula, and made his female protagonist, Vivienne Michel, the narrator. Fleming was rather dismissive of the work, with the old Etonian’s predilection for the Anglo-Saxon, litotes tradition of understatement. It didn’t help that James Bond only made his first appearance two thirds of the way through the book.
The same charge might be levelled against the latest Fleming biography, by Nicholas Shakespeare. In a book with 70 chapters and over 800 pages, Fleming doesn’t get round to rolling a sheet of paper into his “battered Royal portable typewriter” at Goldeneye, until page 453. The name’s “Secretan, James Secretan.” If Fleming had stuck with that, I don’t suppose we would have heard any more about it. But we can hardly blame Nicholas Shakespeare for delaying Bond’s debut. He has after all written a life of Fleming, not of Bond. And unbelievably, Fleming squeezed the entire Bond canon into the last 12 of his 56 years.
When this very substantial biography of the creator of James Bond hit the bookshelves, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to avoid reading it. I think I’ve read most of the Fleming retrospectives that have appeared throughout the last 60 years. John Pearson’s seminal biography appeared in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death, published by Fleming’s own publisher, Jonathan Cape, who published the last Bond book, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, that same year. Cape also published the first substantial critical analysis of Bond, The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis, in 1965. Other significant memoirs over the years have included Ivar Bryce’s You Only Live Once, Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, biographies by Andrew Lycett and Robert Harling, and a collection of Ian Flemings’s letters (The Man with the Golden Typewriter) edited by Fergus Fleming.
What does Shakespeare add to the mix? His is a scholarly work, carefully annotated, indexed, and referenced, and as such is a fund of information. Critics of Ian Fleming over the years have said that his books are charged with sex, sadism, and snobbery, arguably the characteristics that turned them all into bestsellers. Certainly the snobbery is much in evidence throughout this latest memoir. The upper class world it depicts is, frankly, repugnant. Another aspect of Fleming’s character that comes through very strongly is his melancholia. All his life he wanted to write the spy story that would end all spy stories; yet when he finally achieved his goal, he seems to have derived little satisfaction from it. Having smoked sixty cigarettes a day all his adult life, he suffered a series of heart attacks. His last days were, by all accounts, miserable.
Bond has become a kind of specialist interest for me; not the films; the books. If I had to face an inquisition on the Mastermind chair, I would probably choose as my subject the novels of Ian Fleming. I’m not proud of it. I don’t think the influence of these books upon me has been particularly benign. Yet the fact is they have been a presence in my life for almost as long as I have been able to read. I can remember vividly my first encounter with 007. My father borrowed Dr. No from the local public library. The original hardback cover showed the silhouette of a naked woman amid tropical shrubbery, holding up her hands perhaps in distress, perhaps in horror. Dr. No sounded like a monster. I opened at chapter one and read its remarkable opening sentence, a distillation of Fleming’s unique world. Look it up. Dr. No, the whole book, is itself a distillation of Fleming’s themes of exotica, menace, and the bizarre.
I also vividly remember the day Fleming died, in hospital in Canterbury, in August 1964. Oddly enough I wasn’t that far away, holidaying in Midhurst.
The first Bond book I read cover to cover was the second in the canon, Live and Let Die. I incline to think now that I had better had let alone a book with such a title, and stayed with Louisa M. Alcott. After all, the mantra Live and Let Die is probably going to kill us all. And indeed, Live and Let Die is in many ways a pretty disgusting book, what with people getting eaten alive by big fish. Yet I was fascinated by another monster – Mr. Big. I could see that Mr. Big and Dr. No shared certain characteristics. I could discern that the Bond books followed a pattern:
A blip on the periphery of the intelligence world.
Bond’s summons to the anonymous grey building in Regent’s Park, to be briefed by M. He is introduced to a mystery, and a “mistery” – a professional world, of gold, of diamonds, of heraldry, of toxic flora.
An exotic location. A girl.
A preliminary skirmish with an outlandish monster, a megalomaniac. Perhaps a card game, or a game of golf.
Researches, in the exotic location, into the activities of the monster’s empire.
Discovery, and apprehension.
A severe lecture, akin to the admonition of a headmaster, prior to a caning.
A supreme ordeal.
Bond’s survival, and the grotesque monster’s gruesome demise.
Relationship with girl consummated.
It’s pretty racy stuff. You can see why Mrs Ann Fleming’s arty friends read the books aloud and chortled over them, while Fleming avoided their company and retreated to his library in the attic. I suppose Ann’s friends thought they were John Buchan’s “shilling shockers”, formulaic. Yet it is clear from Book 3, Moonraker, which lacks an exotic location, and in which Bond doesn’t get the girl, that Fleming is continually breaking the mould. Moreover, Fleming’s own physical, and perhaps psychological, deterioration is reflected in the later books. We first pick up on the arc of Bond’s own mental and physical decline at the opening to Goldfinger, when Bond sits in Miami International Airport and muses morosely on the sordidness of his own professional life. From there on, each book starts with Bond in a state of depression, that can only be lifted by his taking on a gargantuan task. At the start of Thunderball the cigarettes and spirits are beginning to take their toll. He is full of self-loathing. By the opening of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he has decided to jack it all in and resign. At the start of You Only live Twice he has lost his wife, his capacity to function, and his will to live. And by the start of The Man with the Golden Gun, he has lost the plot. He attempts to murder M.
Against this background of decay and disintegration, the world he inhabits becomes increasingly bizarre, and increasingly absurd. Fleming himself grew morose because he felt he was running out of ideas. And yet the worlds conjured in the later books are the most imaginative, and the most fantastical. Fleming developed the power, utterly unique, of being simultaneously menacing and farcical. We see it in the Ernst Stavro Blofeld trilogy of Thunderball, OHMSS, and You Only Live Twice. In Thunderball, two extremely ruthless men conduct a feud on a diet of carrot juice, weaponising the paraphernalia of a Health Farm. In OHMSS, Blofeld reveals his own Achilles Heel, snobbery; he wants a title. And in You Only Live Twice, Blofeld retires to Japan “to cultivate his garden”. And what a garden! At the end of the day, in a strange way, the Bond books are absolutely hilarious.
It’s just a pity that the oeuvres were produced at such a cost, and perhaps also that effective interventions in cardiology in the 1960s were virtually non-existent. Today, a catheter lab and the modern pharmacopoeia might have saved Ian Fleming’s life. But would he have been able, or willing, to quit smoking? Somehow I doubt it.
jamescalumcampbell 