‘EVEN KENNEDY TOOK JAMES BOND CREATOR’S HELP’
Biographer Nicholas Shakespeare on the enduring legacy of both Ian Fleming and his British spy
Kindness is not the rst trait that comes to mind when we think of James Bond, but it is telling how often this adjective is brought up in connection with his author. Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, attempts to decode the “enigma” who created one of the world’s best known ctional heroes, an
English secret agent who has had a huge impact on the culture of the 20th century and onward. After all, ve words — “The name’s Bond. James Bond” — are guaranteed to ignite a smile. In an interview on the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival earlier this year, Shakespeare shed light on Fleming’s legacy, how he was an inffuential gure in his own right, and why Bond has endured. Edited excerpts:
Question:
Your expansive biography of Bruce Chatwin pinned down an intrepid traveller and writer. What were your ffrst thoughts when asked to write one of Ian Fleming?
I was wary, though the Fleming Estate promised access to family papers that had not been seen before, because I wondered whether there was anything more to learn or say about Fleming that had not been told already. But as I did a background check, I found that under the bruising surface of his popular image, there was a different person — or people — and many stories. Almost everyone, including past lovers, vouched for his kindness; most agreed that he was “many people” in one. I found that virtually anything you can say of Fleming, the opposite is true too. Also, like Chatwin, he was restless, charming, attracted to both men and women, and pursued knowledge. For instance, he was an important book collector and owned the antiquarian quarterly, The Book Collector.
Answer: Q:
Were you surprised that there’s a huge interest in James Bond, but a lesser interest in Fleming, the creator?
Yes, it is a bit strange because Fleming was a lot more substantial than his ctional character. As Hitler was coming to power, Fleming lived in Austria, Munich and Geneva, and he made a noteworthy contribution to World War II. For example, he organised covert operations in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conffict. He was also part of the inner circle of the British powers-that-be and asked to help bring the U.S. into the ght. He worked to set up and then coordinate with the foreign intelligence department that developed into the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency].
A: Q:
Fleming was part of important decisions but he couldn’t really write about it, could he?
No. He was an inffuential gure in his own right and even world leaders like John F. Kennedy consulted him. There’s a story, not apocryphal, that President Kennedy sought Fleming’s views on how to handle the Cuban crisis, and some of those ideas were indeed implemented. He had fascinating stories to tell but security concerns prevented him from writing them.
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Nicholas Shakespeare (SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT)
Q: A:
Is that one of the reasons he turned to ffction? Well, he created his ctional hero in the last dozen years of his life — he died when he was only 56 years old — and almost as an afterthought. And yet, Fleming’s “fast-moving, high-living” character with his love for cars, women and Martinis, has acted as a lightning rod for generations and their understanding of politics, culture and sex. Fleming knew the undercover world intimately, and there’s a lot of Fleming’s real-life experience in Bond, but it will be fair to say that if Bond had not existed, Fleming is someone we should still want to know about.
Q:
Graham Greene and John le Carré also knew the world of spies...
Greene and le Carré, like James Bond, were minor players in British Intelligence, unlike Fleming, who was in the inner sanctum of British covert operations. Ian, and his brother Peter, were part of a select group cleared to know the war’s top secrets, the decrypts from the code-cracking centre at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire: in April 1940, the list of those with access to this information, known as ULTRA, was restricted to less than 30 people.
A: Q:
His novels, say ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Goldffnger’, ‘From Russia With Love’ et al, then are more than a series of sensational fantasies based on outlandish plots?
Yes. He wrote what he knew. They were grounded in reality and a truth that Fleming could not reveal but had intensely experienced. By converting his lived experience into ction, and updating it, he released the burden of that knowledge. He had to get it out.
A: Q:
Did you enjoy writing this biography? What are you working on?
Once I jumped headlong into the project, I enjoyed nding out about Fleming, but it was di®cult to pin him down as he contained multitudes. Only at the very end did I glance across at his photograph, which had been on my desk for four years, and that he had given to his Swiss ancee Monique; all this time, he had been impenetrable, but suddenly I looked through the veil of cigarette smoke and felt I understood him, and better than that, quite liked him.
I am primarily a novelist, as you know, and am working on a new one.
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India had a lm in virtually every major section of the lm festival but Payal Kapadia’s directorial,
was obviously the crowning glory. The trilingual lm that tells the story of two Malayali nurses working in Mumbai is the rst Indian lm to make the cut for the Palme d’Or since Shaji N. Karun’s
in 1994.
For a change, the Indian contingent at this edition of Cannes was big enough, and visible enough, in the festival’s ‘o³cial’ spaces not to be dismissed as a fringe entity. One question that was certainly not being asked this year was: what were so many Indians doing here when the country had no lms playing in the festival?
In Cannes Classics, a piece of New Indian Cinema history was celebrated with due pomp, at the well-attended screening of Shyam Benegal’s 1976 lm Manthan (The Churning), restored in 4K. Naseeruddin Shah, the only surviving member of the lm’s principal cast (Smita Patil, Girish Karnad, Amrish Puri, Sadhu Meher and Shah), said with a mix of bemusement and excitement: “I’ve been acting in lms for 50 years, but this is my rst time at Cannes.” While Shah had a lm — Mrinal Sen’s Genesis, co-starring Om Puri and Shabana Azmi — in the Cannes O³cial Selection in 1986, he did not attend the premiere.
The Un Certain Regard sidebar, which too is competitive, had a pair of Indian lms: one by a British-Indian woman director, Sandhya Suri, and the other by a Bulgarian helmer, Konstantin Bojanov, who has been visiting the subcontinent for two decades.
“It is tremendously important to open a lm at such a
Light, Swaham All We Imagine as
prestigious lm festival,” said Bojanov, director of The Shameless, starring Mita Vashisht, Anasuya Sengupta, Omara, Tanmay Dhanania, Rohit Kokate and Auroshikha Dey. “I feel it is a rst step towards validation of my work.” The Shameless is about a woman who fiees a Delhi brothel after killing a police inspector and seeks refuge in a ctional North Indian town, starting a same-sex romance with a young girl from a community of sex workers. It had been in the making for over a decade.
The other Indian lm, Suri’s Santosh, was also in development for many years. The project went to the Sundance Directors Lab in 2016. “The idea for Santosh was triggered by an image,” said Suri. “It was a photograph of a policewoman facing a crowd of protesters after the horric 2012 Delhi gangrape.” She was working with a few NGOs to probe the violence against women in India when she saw the photo. “I would not have had
It can only augur well for the future of Indian independent lmmaking when a 38-year-old Indian woman lmmaker goes up against world cinema heavyweights such as Paolo Sorrentino, Jia Zhang-ke, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jacques Audiard and David Cronenberg. Kapadia, a Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) alumna, was in he furore over a recently unveiled portrait of King Charles III seems to belong to a previous century, when sovereigns could exercise real powers of life and death over their subjects and painters could play the part of public gures moulding opinion or, sometimes, prejudice.
Strictly speaking, of course, this is not a royal portrait. Rather, it was commissioned by The Most Worshipful Company of Drapers, an infiuential charitable institution with which the monarch has been associated for more than 50 years. In keeping with this context, the portrait, painted by the 1970-born artist Jonathan Yeo, represents the monarch in the ceremonial red uniform of the Welsh Guards. So far, so good — appropriately to his status as Prince of Wales, Charles III had served in this regiment as a young man.
Had he left it at that, Yeo might have escaped the slings and arrows of outrage and controversy. What has enraged the artist’s detractors is that the painting is suused with clouds of various rather lush and lurid shades of red, a choice of palette that generates a harsh visual contradiction between the fiamboyance of the artistic approach and the reticence of its subject. Some of these irate critics have asked vocally whether the painting’s high-keyed colour refers to hellre and damnation, and whether the artist’s true intention was to hold the monarch to ridicule.
Melodramatic as such readings of the image and its motivations may sound, one cannot really disagree with such criticism. It is possible that the painter intended to suggest the battleeld, with its torrents of blood and smoky artillery explosions, but the general eect of Yeo’s rendering is to make Charles III look rather like a genteel reman wondering how best to make his way out of a blaze.
Taccess to the Indian police for a documentary. So, I chose ction,” she added. Suri’s rst lm, I for India, a documentary, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival nearly two decades ago. “Developing Santosh was a long and plodding process,” she continued. “It felt really good that it got selected at Cannes.”
Cheering for Kapadia A Chrysalid Charles?
Matters are not vastly improved by the monarch butterfiy hovering at Charles III’s right
Cannes for the third time. She won the best documentary prize in 2021 for A Night of Knowing Nothing. Four years earlier, her short ction Afternoon Clouds was a part of Cinefondation
(now La Cinef ),
Cannes’ competition for lm school students.
FTII too occupied centrestage at Cannes this year. The institute’s student
Chidananda S.
Naik’s
Sunfiowers
Were the
First Ones to
◣ displayed at Philip Jonathan Yeo with Buckingham Palace. shoulder. The artist’s explanation is that insect is an emblem sovereign’s long- environmentalist as well as symbolising passage from prince
Right, Chrysalid
Nice try, visual pun that, but not quite. level, even a neutral comes away from with the impression artistic imagination home with digital and virtual space liven up the consecrated medium of oil on special eects vocabulary. playfulness may singularly misplaced, largely negative response shows. genres, especially promise a timeless has vanished from life that grows increasingly precarious, should tampered with.
To be fair to Yeo, impossible to paint persuasive portrait reigning monarch such rulers are constitutional gureheads whose to uphold a soothing continuity for citizens the rough-and-tumble democratic change. public interest, they all sleek surface,