James Bond is still a man for our times

"James Bond - A Man for our Times" by Richard Newbury for La Stampa.

President Kennedy always liked to go to bed with a “Bond” since the British 007’s daring do adventures were his favourite fantasy reading – when of course he was not himself bedding beautiful unattached women, taking amphetamines, organising covert operations in the Caribbean or playing nuclear poker with a Russian Mr Big who was of an iconic grotesqueness that would have stretched even Ian Fleming’s fertile imagination. Indeed Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, had many of the characteristics of the Royal Naval Commander with a “licence to kill”. Some eye-witnesses even claim that Fleming as a war-time Intelligence Chief had personally arranged for Hitler’s Deputy Rudolph Hess to fly to Scotland in May 1941, had liaised with the Admiral the Head of the German Abwehr [Secret Service] and had single-handedly brought Hitler’s new Deputy Martin Boorman to Britain in 1945.

Certainly there is a lot of Fleming in Bond, but what gives the novels universal appeal, and not just to priapic Presidents, is not only their cocktail of “sex, snobbery and sadism” but also the addition to the cocktail shaker of both the post-war political order and a twist of lemon of a mythic element – a Manichean conflict between heroes and antiheroes. That is why the re-make of Casino Royale can use the original plot to lay bare the changing threats, iconic beliefs and moral ambiguities of both the worlds of 1953 and 2007. Of the “anti-hero of Casino Royale, Fleming admitted, “Le Chiffre was serving a useful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which and by which alone, the opposite norm of goodness could exist.” Le Chiffre is reincarnated in the likes of Sir Hugo Drax, Dr No and Goldfinger.

Ian Fleming’s expertise on correct behaviour and high living were those of one who had been educated as a gentleman but who came from a family that had just reached that status. Ian’s puritanical Scottish grandfather, born in a croft, had made a fortune in American Railways and founded the Fleming Bank in London. His eldest son Val became a Conservative MP and married the outgoing Eve Rose, granddaughter of Disraeli’s lawyer and Queen Victoria’s doctor. She became a vistosa political hostess but when Val was killed in 1917, she moved to Chelsea and became a patron of the arts, forcing the libidinous painter Augustus John to give her a daughter, Amaryllis.

Ian was emotionally crippled by his hero father, his powerful mother and brilliant older brother Peter, who excelled at school, while Ian although Victor Ludorum at Eton, had only the option of the Army. This he soon left and was sent to learn German, and undergo Adlerian analysis, in Kitzbuhl and French at Geneva but failed to win a place in the Foreign Office. A spell at Reuters at London, Moscow and Germany followed before becoming first an uninspired banker and then a worse stockbroker, but part-time spy. At 31 in 1939 he found his metier when the Governor of the Bank of England recommended him as Personal Assistant, in effect Deputy, to Admiral Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence, on whom he based “M”. Commander Fleming was at the hub of British Intelligence liaising between MI6 – the Secret Intelligence Service - , GCHQ [“special” Signals Intelligence and Bletchley Park where German Enigma code was broken] and the Political Warfare Executive and Special Operations Executive organising respectively Black Propaganda and Insurrection in occupied territory and all coordinated by JIC – the Joint Intelligence Committee. His brother Peter worked at MI [R] – sabotage. Fleming’s talents of sociability, organisation and imagination had at 31 finally found an outlet in this world of violence, duplicity and evil and the playboy was now at his desk at 6am.

Bond was a composite of spies and Naval Attaches who worked for, or had been recruited by, Fleming: Merlin Minshall who attempted to block the Danube, Michael Mason, a tough landed gentleman, who had been an international boxer and a Canadian trapper, Commander “Biffy” Dunderdale, MI6 Chief in Paris who drove around in a bullet proof Rolls Royce and financed his espionage from his personal fortune and Commander “Sandy” Glen, an alumnus of “the Scottish Eton” Fettes – like Bond [and Blair] - who as Naval Attache’ in Belgrade seduced secrets and a wife away from a Belgian diplomat.

After Pearl Harbour Fleming was sent over to Washington to “give birth to the CIA” or the OSS as it first was, for the US had to start - with a $10m grant! - a co-ordinated Intelligence Service effectively from zero. The US Army in 1938 had been only the 19th largest in the world and had a steep learning curve. Fleming knew too much to be allowed to risk capture on active operations, but the nearest he got was Golden Eye, codename for a stay behind [Gladio] in Spain if the Germans invaded. Here he played against Germans in the Estoril Casino and demanded that the Germans let him travel on a Lufthansa flight from Lisbon to Madrid. Golden Eye was to become the name of his isolated house in Jamaica where he wrote the Bond novels. “Ian’s Red Indians” was the name of the Intelligence Assault Units that he founded for the Dieppe and Normandy Invasions and whom he visited in the front line. Fleming left the Navy in 1945 determined to assuage his remorse for not seeing active service by writing spy stories.

Fleming’s attitude towards women, whom he did not disguise that he felt inferior, was tainted by his self-disgust at getting gonorrhoea at the Royal Military College Sandhurst and the powerful love-hate relationship with his mother, who succeeded in forcing Ian with financial and emotional blackmail to break off three engagements. For his platonic friend Lady Mary Pakenham “He looked on girls as a schoolboy does. They were remote mysterious beings who you will never hope to understand, but if you’re clever, you can occasionally shoot one down.” “He liked having a cowering slave” said another. He rarely made the first move and his means of seduction was to invite the victim to a dinner of sausages and champagne at his converted chapel in Chelsea with its Man Ray photographs and then ignore her while leaving her to read his French flagellation pornography. This proved a rigorous self-selecting process. His long term “maitresse en titre” from 1932 was Lady Maud Russell, who was seventeen years his senior and in the 1930s was organising the smuggling of her fellow German Jews out of Germany. For Ian his ideal woman was “thirtyish, Jewish, a companion, who wouldn’t need education in the arts. She would aim to please, have firm flesh and kind eyes.”

Ann Chatteris first married Lord O’Neill, who was killed in the war, but already she was in love with both Esmond Harmondsworth, the heir to the Daily Mail’s owner Lord Rothermere and “Glamour Boy” Ian Fleming. She married Esmond in 1946 when Ian refused to propose but then in 1952 left him for Ian. “We are of course totally unsuited – both Gemini. 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 rages 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.” The marriage failed however because Ann found “the deserts of pomposity between the oases of wit were too vast””. There was no divorce but Ann began an affair with Hugh Gaitskill the Leader of the Labour Party. “Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role,” opined US Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Casino Royale, written in 1952 describes that limbo land – physical and moral. Traditional glories are represented by the 1933 3.5 litre Bentley, but in the Casino Bond needs “Marshall Aid” from the CIA’s Felix Leiter to continue his Baccarat game with double dealing Le Chiffre, whom the Russians kill before Bond can. Indeed it is the Russians who save Bond and not the British or the Americans, and Bond does not even get Vesper Lynd, who as a double agent has betrayed not just him but all Western Intelligence’s anti-Soviet operations – just as the Cambridge Spies Burgess, Maclean, Blunt, Cairncross and Philby had just done in betraying “the Crown Jewels” of the Atom bomb technology. As much “one of us” and members of the Establishment as Fleming/Bond, these “traitors/patriots” had looked east to the Soviet Empire and not the new American one which had cannibalised the British one. Fleming writing on the British colony of Jamaica looks west, but with the jaundiced eye of an Intelligence chief who can always see both sides’ points of view. “Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government department,” said Fleming of his creation. This is also true of the 2007 Bond although I am afraid “gentlemen do not drive Fords”. International terrorism in a Christian Uganda will cause no offence to either advertisers or jihadisti; ditto Montenegro. Vespa Lynd no longer works for the French Deuxieme Bureau but as an accountant for the British Treasury! Bond is violent but not powerful. We are all terrorised. Yet we are all victims – especially the terrorists. Indeed we are all double agents now. Our loyalties appear torn between those who Quixote-like declare war on terrorism and those who believe in being nice to the crocodile in the hope of being eaten last – or hopefully saved in the nick of time by James Bond licensed to kill by terrestrial rather than celestial fiat.

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