Agent of his own fantasies - book extract from Henry Chancellor
04-Jan-2006 • Literary
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IAN Fleming may have been very practical about writing James Bond, but at heart he was a romantic. He wrote so fast and with such apparent ease because he was tapping directly into a deep wellspring of his own imagination, which he laced with an unusual blend of sex, travel, culinary detail and fine living that perfectly encapsulated the aspirations of the age and was absolutely an expression of Fleming himself.
He may have dismissed his creation as idle fantasy, but he was entirely serious about the world he had created. There are barely any jokes in the James Bond novels and there is little irony or satire either. Fleming could not put any clear water between himself and his fiction because he was living his work as he wrote it: he was transforming the commonplace and unexciting into a glamorised version of life as he would have liked it to be.
To discover the origins of James Bond one has to begin by exploring the deep streams that fed the well of Fleming's imagination, and his own complicated personality.
Fleming went to a psychiatrist twice in his life and on both occasions he found the experience unhelpful. Had he persevered, the shrink might have had an interesting time trying to make sense of a man so full of contradictions. On the one hand he was a melancholic loner who did not understand people, yet on the other he needed male company and was intolerant of melancholy in others.
He loved women but often treated them brutally. He disliked intellectuals but craved literary recognition. He was both introvert and extrovert, and tried to arrange his life to indulge both. After his death at the relatively early age of 56 from a lifetime's heavy smoking and drinking, many of his friends attempted to make sense of his confusing personality in quasi-psychological terms: it was all to do with his mother, who never really let go of him, or it was all about trying to compete with his older brother, who was brilliant and successful, or it was about never quite forgiving his long-dead father for having left him.
Whatever the textbook interpretation of the paradoxes at the heart of Fleming's character, in the invented world of James Bond, Fleming did manage to achieve the order and symmetry that were lacking in his own. And, having invented such a vivid world for his alter ego, 007, it was a short step to imagine that he had as good as been there himself. This desire to escape had been present from the start.
Ian Lancaster Fleming was born on May 28, 1908, the second son of Valentine and Eve Fleming. Valentine was an honourable, moneyed young Conservative MP, whose wife was a striking bohemian beauty. Eve's sparkling eyes, red cheeks and penchant for wide-brimmed hats did much to ameliorate the domineering, autocratic personality which cast a long shadow over Ian's life.
The Flemings were a glamorous couple and enjoyed all the outward trappings of wealth and success that one associates with the long, hazy summer of the Edwardian era. They lived at Braziers Park, a large gothic house near Ipsden in Oxfordshire, where Valentine kept his own pack of beagles, or when in London at Pitt House, a white Georgian house on the edge of Hampstead Heath.
The Flemings had the appearance of landed wealth that stretched back generations, but in fact their privileged lives were all down to the acute financial acumen of Robert Fleming, Ian's grandfather. Robert Fleming was one of those late Victorians who made a vast amount of money in a very short time.
He started with nothing, growing up in considerable poverty on the Liff Road, a slum in Dundee, as one of seven children, five of whom died in childhood. Robert left school at 13 and was taken on as a clerk by Baxters, the established Dundee jute barons.
He soon proved himself a remarkably shrewd young man and at 27 he set up the Scottish American Investment Trust, a pioneering fund that invested in the American railroad boom and guaranteed a 6 per cent return. This was an enticing prospect: the risk was low, and the return was double that offered by the London Stock Exchange. By 1900 Robert Fleming had become one of the richest men in London.
Valentine Fleming, who had gaily ridden off to war in 1914 with the Oxfordshire Hussars, endured three years on the Western Front before he was killed by a shell on Sunday, May20, 1917. Ian, who was not quite nine, was deeply affected, and though he never spoke of his father in later life, he kept a signed copy of Winston Churchill's moving obituary of his fellow officer and friend framed on his bedroom wall.
Edited extract from James Bond: The Man and his World by Henry Chancellor (John Murray, $39.95 AUD).
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