The Man With the Golden Typewriter; Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters, Edited by Fergus Fleming (2016)

I came to an odd realization while reading the collected James Bond letters by author Ian Fleming (1908-1964), The Man With the Golden Typewriter, edited by Fergus Fleming – and that was I really like Ian Fleming, the man.

Odd because … well, are any self-respecting 21^st century males supposed to like someone like Fleming?  A drinking, smoking, sexist, politically incorrect dinosaur?  Bosh to all that, we heartily reply.  The Fleming that emerges from his letters is a warm, intelligent, witty and engaging man, kind to a fault and capable of deep and sincere friendships.  If the Ian Flemings of this world are dinosaurs, then, bring back the dinosaurs, we say.

This indispensable look inside the mind of the man who created James Bond is neatly organized – each group of letters is filed under the titles of his 14 Bond books.  Interspersed between his thrillers, though, are chapters that collect letters between Fleming and Geoffrey Boothroyd (who consulted with the writer on guns and weaponry – and who makes a cameo in the novel Dr. No), mystery great Raymond Chandler, and Herman W. Liebert, librarian at Yale University and Samuel Johnson scholar, who worked with Fleming on mastering American slang for the US-based Bond books.

But the majority letters are between Fleming and Daniel George and Michael Howard, editors at Cape, the first publishers of James Bond, and William Plomer, South African-born poet who was Fleming’s friend and literary mentor.  These letters are a revelation because they illustrate how tenuous the entire James Bond enterprise was at its beginning, and how Fleming threw himself into thriller writing with a dedication and seriousness often lacking in his more literary brethren.

These editors did not always have the best judgement, we can now acknowledge with the gift of hindsight.  Editor Michael Howard did not particularly care for From Russia, With Love, now considered one of the two-or-three finest Bond novels.  Fleming replies:  Personally, I think I shall get a good deal of readers criticism such as yours, but I do think it is a good thing to produce a Bond book which is out of the ordinary and which has, in my opinion, an ingenious and interesting plot.  There is also the point that one simply can’t go on writing the simple, bang-bang, kiss-kiss type of book.  However hard one works at it, you automatically become staler and staler and very quickly the staleness shows through to the reader and then all is indeed lost.

Fleming was not after realism – and he gleefully acknowledges that in these letters.  But he did want to get his facts correct – if you read about something (anything – from deep sea diving to poisonous fish to Fort Knox) in a Fleming novel, know that it was researched and checked, and that Fleming strove to get it right.  It is also clear that Fleming attacked his work with complete conviction – as if, in writing about the preposterous, he could make it more believable by believing in it, himself.  This lack of irony is perhaps his greatest legacy as an author, and perhaps stamps him as the last serious creator of escapist fiction.

But is industry enough to make me … like Fleming?  No, it is the many kindnesses chronicled throughout these letters.  People who provide information or help are often presented with thoughtful gifts, courtesy of Cartier.  When John Goodwin, founding president of the James Bond Club, wrote Fleming, he found himself invited to the set of From Russia, With Love.  Fleming entreats an editor friend to write about an ill, aging author ushering in her 80s, while signed books and sweet notes to fans are the order of the day.

Most telling, Fleming sends note after note after heart-attacks and illnesses, putting on a brave front, making jokes, and putting his friends at ease.  Here is one letter, recounting advice he received on recovering from heart attack:  Am receiving the most extraordinary advices from various genii. “Be more spiritual” (Noel Coward), “write the story of Admiral Godfrey” (Admiral Godfrey), “Be sucked off gently every day (Evelyn Waugh).  Over to you.

In these pages, we recently reviewed The Spy Who Loved Me, one of the greatest of the Bond thrillers.  Amazingly, this book was dismissed by many reviewers at the time, who wanted ‘the mixture as before.’  These reviews hurt Fleming, who wrote with a specific purpose in mind:  I had become increasingly surprised to find that my thrillers, which were designed for an adult audience, were being read in the schools, and that young people were making a hero out of James Bond when to my mind, and as I have often said in interviews, I do not regard James Bond as a heroic figure but only as an efficient professional in his job … So it crossed my mind to write a cautionary tale about Bond to put the record straight in the minds particularly of young readers.

He can also be needlessly self-deprecating, as he writes to Raymond Chandler:

Dear Ray,

Many thanks for the splendid Chandleresque letter.  Personally I loved yor review and thought it was excellent as did my publishers, and as I say it was really wonderful of you to have taken the trouble.

Probably the fault about my books is that I don’t take them seriously enough and meekly accept having my head ragged off about them in the family circle.  If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond.  You after all write ‘novels of suspense’ – whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.

But I have taken you advice to heart and will see if I can’t order my life so as to put more feeling into my typewriters.

Incidentally, have you read A Most Contagious Game, by Samuel Grafton, published b Rupert Hart-Davis?

Sorry about lunch even without a butler.  I also know some girls andwill dangle one in front of you one of these days.

I had no idea you were ill.  If you are, please get well immediately.  I’m extremely ill with sciatica.

Fleming also mentions his many brother thriller writers, and clearly read deeply in the field.  He mentions Fu Manchu, Nero Wolfe, Richard Hannay, Mr. Moto and alludes to Simon Templar.  (He rather preferred Marquand’s Moto books to his more serious novels.)  This sense of continuity charming, and one wonders what Fleming would have made of the scores of Bond imitators over the years.

There are some problems with the book: it could have used an additional edit (one letter appears, verbatim, in two separate chapters), and the index is vague to the point of useless.   More amusing, Fergus Fleming closes with a list of Bond novels and Bond films, which is as pressing as telling Californians that they live on the West Coast.  But despite these few missteps, The Man With the Golden Typewriter is essential for Fleming devotees.

Readers interested in Bond are referred to these wonderful sites:  James Bond Memes at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/ and Artistic License Renewed at: https://literary007.com/. 

The Spy Who Loved Me, by Ian Fleming (1962)

It is very hard for people who have never read Ian Fleming (1908-1964) before to dip into the James Bond novels.  And that is mainly because the movies have ruined our perception of Fleming and his world, perhaps for all time.

This is not to say that all Bond-films are bad.  Some of them – Goldfinger (1964), Octopussy (1983) and a few other come to mind – are delightful fun; and others – most significantly From Russia, With Love (1963) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) – are almost real movies, films that pack an emotional and intellectual heft.  But from the best to the worst, there is very little of Fleming’s Bond in these films, and the rewards of reading Fleming have not yet been replicated in other mediums.

Despite the fact that Fleming himself sometimes denigrated his own work, it is clear that he was a novelist with ambitions within, and beyond, the framework in which he wrote.  He was initially influenced by the ‘hardboiled’ school of detective fiction, and professed a great love of Raymond Chandler (1888-1959).  But his earliest books, Casino Royale (1953) and Live and Let Die (1954), are little better than simple thrillers.  It was only with his third book, Moonraker (1955) that the unique fictive world he sought to create started to crystalize. 

Pop fiction can be written with various degrees of artistry, and such books as From Russia, With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), and You Only Live Twice (1964) are written with a great deal of dash and more than a touch of something akin to a pulpy poetry.  When Fleming finally found that unique “voice” of the Bond thrillers, he was writing with a stylish purity that cannot be found in mere potboilers. 

Like the most vivid of thriller writers (Sax Rohmer comes to mind, ditto John Buchan and very early Leslie Chateris), Fleming wrote with complete conviction: once he finally found the voice of Bond and his world, he wrote with a complete and total emotional investment.  It is this authorial honesty that makes so many of the books work so wonderfully well.

But he was also acutely aware that the Bond novels were simply entertainments.  Expertly crafted and intriguing, but still simply entertainments.

And so, he tried, within the framework he had created, to transcend the disposability that was hardwired into character and the framework of the novels.  These experiments resulted in the terrific short story collection For Your Eyes Only (1960), and the only first-person James Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me (1962).

For Your Eyes Only consists of five short stories, and most of them are as “Un-Bondian” as one can imagine.  More literary, more anecdotal, more set in a recognizable reality, Fleming slips into Somerset Maugham territory with tight and psychologically sound short stories that humanize Bond.  I find For Your Eyes Only to be a terrific book with which to hook readers on Fleming, and it is highly recommended.

However, Fleming comes his very closest to a real, moving and genre-busting novel with The Spy Who Loved Me.  Initially dismissed by the critics (so much so that Fleming put the kibosh on paperback reprints in his lifetime) and usually shrugged off by hardcore Bond fans (more on that later), The Spy Who Loved Me is actually Fleming at his best: psychosocially sound, moving and profoundly real.

Spy is written in the first person by a young French-Canadian woman, Vivienne Michel.  She tells of her leaving her provincial hometown and the nuns that taught her, and, of her first love affair with a boy named Derek.  Fleming writes of a terrifying (and searing) moment when Vivienne nearly loses her virginity in a dirty cinema, and how Derek casts her aside once he uses her.  

Vivienne then steals herself against emotional involvement until later when she and her German boss, Kurt, become lovers.  Though cold and calculating, their relationship is satisfactory until Vivienne finds herself pregnant.  Horrified at the notion of marrying a non-German, Kurt fires her and gives her a plane ticket and an abortion as severance.

Finally promising herself that she is through with men, Vivienne then takes to her handy Vespa, and starts travelling down through Canada and into the United States.   It is in these passages that some of Fleming’s most pungent writing can be found: his disdain for tourist culture and kitschy roadside attractions drips from the page like rank battery acid.

Vivienne finds work in a soon-to-close for the season motel near Lake George.  On her last night there, alone and waiting for the owners to come next morning, Vivienne is assaulted and detained by two small-time punks, Sluggsy and Horror.  Rape and murder seem to be her ultimate fate … until the doorbell rings.

It’s Bond, James Bond, stranded with a flat tire.  At first, Vivienne thinks he is another punk:  At first glance I inwardly groaned—God it’s another of them!  He stood there so quiet and controlled and somehow with the same quality of deadliness as the others.  And he wore that uniform that the films make one associate with gangsters—a dark-blue belted raincoat and a soft black hat pulled rather far down.  He was good-looking in a dark, rather cruel way, and a scar showed whitely down his left cheek.  I quickly put my hand up to hide my nakedness.  Then he smiled and suddenly I thought I might be all right.

It doesn’t take a famous, world-class secret agent much time to deduce that there are problems in this little, out-of-the-way motel.  Before too many pages fly by (and they do fly by), Bond has saved Vivienne from the burning motel, eliminated the punks, and bedded our heroine.  More than that, he smooths matters over with the police, and ensures that Vivienne is on the road safe-and-sound in her Vespa as if nothing ever happened.  James Bond, professional killer and troubleshooter, restores her faith in male-kind.

Fleming plays a very canny (and very tricky) game here: Bond is, no matter how much one wants to parse his motives and methods, a hero.  But he is also a denizen of a darker and more dangerous world; a world that has no place for normal people with normal problems like Vivienne Michel.  But it is this compromised figure who saves her life and restores her faith in people.  Fleming is fully aware of the irony, and we, who know so much of Bond from previous books, know as well.

However, it is this very act of authorial savvy that prevents Fleming from elevating his tale into something closer to a real literary achievement, rather than merely executing a world-class entertainment.  Because the very presence of James Bond in the third act cheapens everything that comes before it.

My paperback edition of Spy runs to 180 pages, and James Bond does not enter until page 108.  What has been a straight novel now becomes a James Bond adventure.  Fleming had the confidence to stretch and try something new, but not enough to do it without the crutch of his most famous creation.  Could he have written a novel where Bond makes a late-page entrance and does not play the role of hero and savior?  Yes, we are convinced of it.  But, at the last minute, his nerve failed him and he went for something more tried-and-true. 

The Spy Who Loved Me is a terrific book that is let down by its ending, and a stellar James Bond novel that ultimately fails once James Bond comes into it.  As such, it hovers in a weird twilight within the Fleming corpus: an almost straight novel of real power and insight that is just a fair James Bond adventure. 

Ian Fleming was only 56 at the time of his death, and he was just entering the height of his powers.  What kind of novels would we have gotten from him had he another 10 or 20 years of life?  Would he have continued to grow and evolve as a novelist?  Would he have ultimately abandoned James Bond and written more literary novels?

We’ll never know.  But we do know that in the realm of pop fiction, Fleming was in a class by himself.

Readers interested in Bond are referred to these wonderful sites:  James Bond Memes at: https://jamesbondmemes.blogspot.com/ and Artistic License Renewed at: https://literary007.com/.

Egyptomania Hits the Dahesh

Yesterday the Dahesh Museum Gift Shop in Hudson Square played host to a capacity crowd for the debut of Bob Brier’s new book, Egyptomania.  Brier is, of course, the celebrated egyptologist who has written eight books, including The Murder of Tutankhamen, and was host of television’s The Great Egyptians and The Mummy Detective. 

Though an academic with multiple degrees (including actually getting a medical degree to better understand the underlying cause of death of the mummies he has examined), Brier brings to his field of expertise an infectious sense of fun and a true sense of wonder.  Rarely have I laughed so much at a lecture, nor can I remember having been regaled with stories by an expert who is as much entertainer as academic. 

Brier’s book chronicles our three thousand year obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs, and provides a wonderful juxtaposition between the learned (his chronicle of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, complete with a retinue of savants to provides what might be history’s first ethnographic study) and the commercial, cataloging “mummy” sheet music, Cleopatra cigarettes and mummy movies featuring everyone from Boris Karloff to Peter Cushing.

Brier argues that no ancient civilization compares to Egypt for its romantic hold on our imagination.  He thinks this is a mixture of our fascination with mummies (here – easily recognizable – are human beings who walked the earth thousands of years ago); the art of Egyptian hieroglyphics; and, of course, what he calls “the Indiana Jones effect.”  Egypt has inspired exotic adventure fiction from pens as diverse as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer and H. Rider Haggard – and this touch of exotica continues in the films of Steven Spielberg and Stephen Sommers.

Your correspondent had the pleasure of interviewing Brier at his home in the Bronx, which is crammed with enough Egyptian artifacts to gladden the heart of Indiana Jones.  That interview, along with a more detailed review of his book, will follow in a few weeks.

In other Dahesh news, the country’s premiere museum-without-walls, has taken the remarkable step of purchasing Frederic, Lord Leighton’s imposing Star of Bethlehem, to expand the scope of the current exhibition, Sacred Visions: Nineteenth-Century Biblical Art from the Dahesh Museum Collection, on view until February 16, 2014 at the Museum of Biblical Art.  Curators and directors from each institution immediately agreed to add the painting to the current installation, as this presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the Leighton alongside other like-themed treasures.  The exhibition traces the renewed interest in Biblical myths following the expansion of biblical archeology and the advent of photography, which produced travel books with pictures of the Holy Land.

Curator Alia Nour said last night, “We decided to remove two smaller paintings to make room for this very large one and started to work on a new label. We deemed it worthwhile to give visitors access to one of the most powerful biblical works Leighton produced during the 1860s.”

New Yorkers who have not yet seen the show now have added impetus, and those who have already seen it an added reason to see it once again.  The Museum of Biblical Art is at 1865 Broadway at 61st Street, and admission is free.  For more information, call 212.408.1500.

The Quest of the Sacred Slipper by Sax Rohmer

Few guilty pleasures in life are more delicious than immersion into the delirious, pulpy universe of Sax Rohmer.

Born Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (1883–1959) in Birmingham to a working class family, Rohmer initially toiled as a public servant before becoming a writer.  Rohmer was an incredibly well-read man and amateur Egyptologist; he also was a working writer in every sense of the term, knocking out magazine articles and comedy sketches. 

Rohmer published several stories and a novel before really hitting his stride in 1913 with the publication of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  This novel was actually a collection of several inter-connected short stories, strung together by one over-arching narrative thrust:  secret agent Nayland Smith and his comrade Dr. Petrie working to rid the world of an evil criminal mastermind bent on taking over the world.  The next two novels in the series, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu and The Hand of Fu-Manchu, were also short stories strung together.  When Rohmer revived the series in 1931, with Daughter of Fu Manchu, he turned to full-novel form.  Some of these later novels are the best in the series (such as the Trail of Fu Manchu), but the sustained narrative structures does seem to knock the wind out of some of them.

Rohmer also wrote several different series of detective novels, featuring such characters as Gaston Max and Morris Klaw (who featured largely in supernatural mysteries).  Rohmer was one of the most well-paid thriller writers of his generation, and for laughs would sometimes sign his name $ax Rohmer.  He and his wife moved to New York after World War II and he died in 1959 from avian flu.  His wife, along with his assistant, Cay Van Ash, wrote a splendid biography of the man in 1972, called, appropriately, Master of Villainy.  (Ash also wrote two Fu Manchu novels of his own, one featuring Sherlock Holmes, and they are equal to those of Rohmer.)

It’s hard to imagine the full impact of Rohmer’s legacy today, after Fu Manchu has been watered down by countless imitators and the tides of political correctness.  However, it’s safe to say that without Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith, there would have been no James Bond, as author Ian Fleming had said that Rohmer’s novels were a key influence on his style and his decision to become a writer.  Many of the tropes that were invented or perfected by Rohmer have become today’s clichés, and the debt the thriller genre owes him is immeasurable.

Part of the great fun to be had by reading Rohmer is his fevered emotional pitch, the heavily scented style of his prose, and the sheer momentum of his narrative.  There are two other key ingredients of Rohmer’s charm.  First, nearly everything a reader comes across in his novels – no matter how outlandish – is usually real.  If Rohmer says there’s an 18 inch poisonous centipede, rest assured, there is one.  Another key is Rohmer’s commitment to his story and his characters – this man believed.  There is never a hint of irony, never less than his 100% commitment as an artist.  He may not have been writing literature, but he wrote it as if he was.

He was also a master of description.  Here, for example, is there first time the world knew of Fu Manchu:  Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

My affection for Rohmer came flooding back to me during a recent reading of his sublimely lurid The Quest of the Sacred Slipper, first published serially in Short Stories Magazine and collected into novel form in 1919.  Sacred Slipper is available for free from the invaluable manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg.  Seekers after vintage shivers need go no further.

How to describe The Quest of the Sacred Slipper?  Pure purple romance.  It starts with our narrator, a newspaper man named Cavanagh, inheriting responsibility for a Muslim holy relic, the Slipper of the Prophet (once worn by Allah himself) after the man who uncovered it, Prof. Deeping, is murdered.  Two factions are after it – a league of Muslim assassins called the Hashishin, and a celebrated American cracksman named Earl Dexter (also called The Stetson Man for his taste in hats).  The Hashishin are led by the murderous Hassan of Aleppo, and leave a trail of severed hands and dead men as they and Dexter pursue the slipper, with Cavanagh and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Bristol always one step behind.

All of this is delivered in a delirious, ornate, heavily scented style; as if Oscar Wilde and Ian Fleming collaborated on a thriller while drinking too much absinthe.

Of course, many readers will snort at the Hashishin – ritualistic Muslim murderers who smoke hashish before committing their crimes.  But remember, it’s Sax Rohmer we’re writing of here, so it’s no surprise that the Hashishin actually existed after a fashion, and that the word “assassin” actually derives from the same root.  And for Rohmer to have anticipated murderous Muslim fanatics roaming London fully 90 years before it actually happened adds additional irony to the notion that he was a mere pulpy romance writer.  (I often think of Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar/The Saint, who wrote that World War II showed that writers of “Yellow Peril” fiction for the 20 years previous might have been onto something.)

Here’s a taste of some of the incensed delights to be found in the Golden Slipper:

All that I knew of the weird group of fanatics – survivals of a dim and evil past – who must now be watching this cottage as bloodlustful devotees watch a shrine violated, burst upon my mind.  I peopled the still blackness with lurking assassins, armed with the murderous knowledge of by-gone centuries, armed with invisible weapons which stuck down from afar, supernaturally.

Or: Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different.  No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its progress throughout.

No one would argue that Sax Rohmer was a great writer, or that his novels enter the elevated realms of high art.  But he did do something no thriller writer was ever able to pull off – he wrote trash that could be savored by aesthetes.