The name’s Fleming, Ian Fleming
• Biography shows the best-selling author lived a more remarkable life than his famous creation
HA BULLIED SCHOOLBOY, A RISK-TAKER AND SOMEONE WHO DELIGHTED IN SEDUCING WOMEN
ad Ian Fleming’s sole achievement been the creation of British superspy James Bond, he would have been a literary giant — but this bestselling author’s life was far more remarkable than that.
With Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, Nicholas Shakespeare has produced a meticulously researched and absorbing biography of a man whose true achievements may never be fully realised. This is because so little has been recorded of Fleming’s own intelligence activities during — and probably long after — World War 2.
The author’s niece said: “I was only allowed to meet Uncle Ian when I was past 18 because he was so dangerous. He’d had lots of women and drank too much, my mother said. She was appalled at his behaviour.”
A dangerous, boozy womaniser? Add a sadistic streak, a thirst for action and adventure and you see much of Fleming in his iconic creation: Bond. James Bond.
This biography covers the genesis of Bond and the explosion of interest in this creation. However, it also covers his childhood, his time at Eton, at Sandhurst, studying languages in Austria, and working in the City of London and in journalism.
If some may find Bond slightly two-dimensional, especially in the rather populist portrayals of the later movies, we read that his creator was far from that.
Fleming moved in the top circles, as one would expect from an Old Etonian in the days of Empire. He worked for Winston Churchill and chatted with JF Kennedy, who was a Bond fan (as was the president’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald).
His Jamaican home, Goldeneye, (where have you heard that name before?) was offered to former British prime minister Anthony Eden as a convalescent home in the wake of the Suez crisis, while Ian’s wife, Anne, was the mistress of Hugh Gaitskell, a leader of Her Majesty’s opposition.
While Bond was Fleming’s gift to entertainment (though he also authored the children’s classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang), his most worthwhile gift to his nation was undoubtedly his time in Naval Intelligence.
Commander Fleming was present at the highest level, and while he did little spying of his own (apart from some clandestine work when on journalistic assignments), his work in directing intelligence operations was monumental.
“The pre-Bond Fleming was a patriotic Scot who had lived in Austria, Munich and Geneva as Hitler was coming to power. He made a noteworthy contribution to World War 2 — and not only in organising covert operations in Nazi-occupied Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conflict. He was also one of a trusted few who were charged with trying to bring the US into the fight and worked to set up and then co-ordinate with the foreign intelligence department that developed into the CIA. Following the Allied victory of 1945, he continued to play an undercover role in the Cold War from behind his [London] Sunday Times desk,” Shakespeare tells us.
THE EMERGENCE OF BOND CAME AS THE SUN WAS SETTING ON THE BRITISH EMPIRE, SO THERE IS A NOSTALGIC ELEMENT
He quotes Christopher Moran, a professor of US national security who specialises in Fleming ’ s secret service work, as saying: “It ’ s impossible to cling to the orthodoxy that Ian Fleming was a nobody. He was unique, there is nobody to compare him with.
“He was invested in and aware of the whole cycle of intelligence, which is remarkable when you think of the compartmentalised world — ‘the need to know ’— of intelligence. Fleming transcended that world.
He was not a desk officer; he was the desk.”
This thorough and detailed biography follows the progression of Fleming’s life —a bullied schoolboy who grew up in the shadow of a more successful older brother, a risktaker and someone who delighted in his success in seducing women. His sex life was as violent as his greatest creation, for he was inclined to take a whip to the bedroom.
Having had such an active, though secretive, wartime, in some ways Fleming’s life would never be as fulfilling again despite his eventual success as an author.
“Ian never lived at such an intense level again,” Shakespeare writes. “He would spend the rest of his life in peacetime, trying to recapture moments of time like these. The way he did that was by writing the books which have become the reason we are still reading about him today.”
Through Bond, Fleming could recall, with a generous dose of exaggeration, his own experiences.
“A perception of Ian’s novels that he did much to popularise is that they were a series of sensational fantasies based on the most hopeless-sounding plots. This was not the case. They were grounded in reality and a truth that Ian could not reveal but had intensely experienced. He wrote what he knew,” Shakespeare writes.
Many of the names of his fictional characters were drawn from fact. The name James Bond is likely to have been copied from the author of a book on birds, though another theory is that Fleming’s brother, Peter, was saved during the war by a hero by the name of Bond, and that gave the author the idea for the name.
We read in this biography of the trials and tribulations that led to the novels and then the Bond films. And there were actual trials — when the plot of the Thunderbird novel too closely followed a screenplay written by someone else, but which Fleming had replicated.
The emergence of Bond came as the sun was setting on the British Empire, so there is a nostalgic element to the novels.
“Conceived as a post-war British fantasy, as a balm for a demoralised imperial power on its uppers, James Bond has evolved into an immaculate agent of escapism. The lower the sun has sunk on the empire that Bond was born into, the more radiant his glow,” Shakespeare writes.
James Bond was conceived as Fleming was snorkelling in his beloved Jamaica, where he went to write his novels, escaping an unhappy marriage and indulged with generous leave by his employer, the London Sunday Times.
“Suddenly, as he floated over the reef, above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the BurgessMaclean defection, and reestablish SIS as ‘the most dangerous’ Secret Service in Russian eyes,” we read.
Despite his immense success and eventual riches, Fleming’s last days were wretched. His marriage was fragile, with Ann Fleming determined to spend her husband’s money even faster than it poured in. His only son, Caspar, was bipolar and would go on to commit suicide in his early 20s. He lost his father in his early teens.
Ian Fleming loved his golf and booze, even when his ability to attract and seduce women faded, but he was afflicted with a hereditary poor heart and spent his last days in poor health. Fortunately, just before he died, he was able to have a last 18 holes after finally being elected as the head of his beloved golf club.
Shakespeare has done his subject an immense favour in writing such a thorough, objective and enthralling biography. It is long. Very long. However, it does give us an insight into a wonderful, if flawed, character, into a changing world as World War 2 made way for the Cold War and the very real fear of nuclear annihilation.
With talk that the next onscreen Bond may be black or female, we may be departing from the roguish but sadistic creation who has saved the world in so very many improbable but entertaining ways. There have been and will be many depictions of James Bond. But there was only one Ian Fleming, and what a life he led!