“Do you often feel like you’re Bond and Bond is Fleming? » To this question asked during an interview published three months after his death, in 1964 at the age of 56, Ian Fleming replied: “When I make him smoke a certain type of cigarette or drink a certain type of bourbon , it’s because I make it myself and I know the taste. But, of course, James Bond is an extremely fictionalized version of anyone, let alone myself. » In an interview given to Canadian television six months before his death, he claimed that the James Bond stories were based 90% on his personal experience. As soon as the publication of Casino Royalethe first novel in the series, the question was raised: what was there of Fleming and his life in the character and adventures of spy literature’s most famous hero? Opinions were very divided on this point, sometimes diametrically opposed.
In the new biography of the writer that he has just published, Nicholas Shakespeare offers a subtle answer: Bond is certainly Fleming in several respects, but in the form of an idealized alter ego. Drawing on his experience in the secret services, he attributed to his character exploits inspired by those which, without having carried out them himself, he had had the opportunity to observe very closely. Previous biographers of Fleming, notably John Pearson and Andrew Lycett, have already shed light on his activities within British intelligence services during the Second World War. Shakespeare, who fully acknowledges his debt to his predecessors, provides a series of additional details about them. Most English spy writers – Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, John le Carré (Eric Ambler is a notable exception) – worked for the British Crown Secret Service. Unlike the last two, Shakespeare suggests, who were only ever entrusted with missions of little importance, Fleming, throughout the Second World War, was at the heart of the intelligence system. What he saw there provided him, after transposition into the context of the Cold War and the addition of a good dose of fantasy, the material for James Bond stories.
Ian Fleming was born into a wealthy family of Scottish origin, the second boy in a series of four. Three figures dominated his childhood and youth. First his father, a member of Parliament, died at the front in 1917 when he was 9 years old: all his life he kept a copy of his obituary, signed by Winston Churchill, who had written it himself. Then his older brother Peter, whom he admired and whose academic prowess, social success, exploits during the Second World War (he is one of the many models of James Bond) and the success that his travel stories earned him continued to crush him until his own fame supplanted his. And finally his mother, an authoritarian and very snobbish woman who intended to completely govern the lives of her children, their studies, their careers and their romantic relationships.
A very good athlete, he was not a brilliant student. Expelled from Sandhurst College for having contracted a venereal disease, he only had a brief stint at Eton, but one that left his mark. Under the effect of the brutal corporal punishments administered there and the cruel punishments inflicted on each other by the students, he acquired a taste for the troubled pleasures of active and passive flogging. And he made connections that were very useful to him throughout his life. In this regard, we can only be struck by the quantity of “Old Etonians” who populate Nicholas Shakespeare’s book: the environment formed by the British intellectual, political, economic and literary elites is particularly homogeneous, as is the remarkable network of mutual aid and influence which results from the links established by its members during their studies in prestigious establishments.
Of what he subsequently undertook thanks to the support of his mother, we will especially remember his time with the Reuters press agency, because there he learned to write in a concise, direct and factual manner and this gave him the opportunity to attend a political trial in Moscow. One of his main activities at this time seems to have been seducing women. Although he often treated them cavalierly, Shakespeare notes, many of his short-lived girlfriends – enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall, said Rebecca West ironically – remained involved with him. Twice he was deeply in love, but both times the story ended badly. When he was 25, judging that the person concerned was not of an appropriate social level, his mother forced him to break up with a young Swiss girl, threatening to cut him off if he did not comply. He gave in. Later, in 1944, an English woman he had known during a language trip to Austria died in a bombing just as he was going to propose to her.
In the meantime, he had entered the service of Admiral John Godfrey, the director of the Naval Intelligence Service. Godfrey, the main model for the character “M” in the adventures of James Bond, was looking for a collaborator with imagination and ease in society. His attention had been attracted by a series of reports on the situation in Europe written by Fleming during a brief stint in the world of finance. He hired him. Never sent to the field, Fleming was however involved in the design of many important initiatives such as Operation Mincemeat, a hoax organized in preparation for the Allied landing in Sicily, as well as other actions, aimed for example at getting their hands on the German Enigma coding machine. He was entrusted with the leadership of a commando of 150 seasoned agents operating in occupied Europe. And he played an active role in the establishment of the American intelligence service which would become the OSS, then the CIA.
After the war, requested by Lord Kemsley, director of the press group which owned the Sunday TimesFleming was appointed head of the daily’s international service. His contract granted him three months of annual vacation which he spent in Jamaica in a bungalow with basic comfort that he had built on the island. Did some of the several hundred correspondents he managed engage in espionage activities alongside their work as journalists? Nicholas Shakespeare leaves the question open, as does that of the exact nature of the links he maintained during these years with his former employers. In 1945, he refused an important position in what had become the SIS (Secret Intelligence Service). But he obviously continued to follow very closely what was happening in this area, for example the defection to Moscow of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two members of the famous circle of English agents of the Soviet Union called the ” Five from Cambridge”, whom he had met at Eton.
Nicholas Shakespeare makes it clear: Ian Fleming began writing spy stories because he was terrified of the monotonous life that awaited him after marrying his future widow. Ann, the former wife of Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail. He had just discovered their affair, from which a daughter was born who did not survive, and obtained a divorce. And Ann was pregnant again.
The first James Bond story was written in 1952 in Jamaica, in a few weeks. The same will go for all the others. Following the example of Alec Waugh (Evelyn Waugh’s brother), Fleming forced himself to write 2,000 words every day, over five hours. Perfectly aware that he was not a literary genius, he strove to achieve a certain quality of prose, simple, energetic and effective. He never reread himself, considering it more important to maintain the rhythm of the story than to waste hours looking for a word. His literary role models were Robert Louis Stevenson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Somerset Maugham, Georges Simenon and, above all, Eric Ambler. One day, Raymond Chandler, whom he admired and whom he had the opportunity to meet, told him that he was capable of doing better than what he had produced up to that point. The effort he made in this direction is at the origin of Good Kisses from Russiaundoubtedly his best novel. In Jamaica, on his property called Goldeneye, when he was not writing, he indulged in underwater fishing. He often entertained other writers, for example Truman Capote, and great friends, such as Noël Coward.
The universe of James Bond stories is psychologically poor, simplistic and Manichean. It reflects a state of mind very present during the Cold War and expresses the nostalgia of the British at the time when their country definitively lost its rank as the leading world power to the United States. It has sometimes been said that the atmosphere of sexuality in which these stories are bathed anticipated the liberation of morals of the 1960s. As Nicholas Shakespeare rightly points out, it should rather be seen as an echo of the freedom which reigned in this area during the war. , in a world where you were never sure of being alive the next day.
Sometimes very funny but fundamentally melancholic in temperament, both seductive and puritanical, generous and egocentric, sometimes charming but willingly distant, Ian Fleming could easily change his mood from one day to the next. A fundamental trait of his character was a deep horror of boredom. “I like thrills,” he confided one day. When his life no longer provided him with the permanent excitement that his single existence and his work in the secret services in the feverish atmosphere of war had provided him, he sought a substitute in the creation of a fictional universe : James Bond is largely the man he would have dreamed of being, he rediscovered with him the intensity of his youth.
With the gradual exhaustion of his stock of memories, however, his imagination gradually dries up. The success of his books and the first screen adaptations made him hostage to the character he had invented, which ended up devouring him. His last years were dark, marked by increasingly acute marital tensions – his wife had an affair with the leader of the Labor Party and he with a young and rich widow he met in Jamaica – as well as by two painful trials: that of her mother, accused of perjury in a case opposing her to the wife of an old aristocrat whom she had wanted to marry, and the one brought against her by one of the co-authors of the film’s script Operation Thunder from which he later wrote a novel.
His health, compromised by decades of heavy drinking and heavy smoking, deteriorated. “I would gladly trade all this,” he once said of his late fame, “for a healthy heart.” » Damaged by a first seizure during his trial, his own dropped him shortly after, on a golf course. His early death spared him from learning of the suicide, nine years later, of his son Caspar. What would Ian Fleming think when he discovered that some 100 million copies of James Bond’s adventures have been sold to date and that several billion people have seen at least one film starring him? He created a myth, which is not given to everyone, but it is not certain that he would take particular pride in it.
