James Bond - The Secret History. Sean Egan
but James Bond didn’t even fit that neutral term. Fleming would make more than one interview comment down the years indicating that the reader was not expected to like his creation. In a 1958 BBC radio duologue with fellow writer Raymond Chandler, for instance, he observed, ‘… he’s always referred to as my hero. I don’t see him as a hero myself. On the whole I think he’s a rather unattractive man …’ In 1964, Fleming told journalist Ken Purdy, ‘I never intended him to be a particularly likeable person, which makes me wonder a bit about the real motives behind the people who treat him like a cult.’ Fleming told Michael Howard of his publishers Cape that he wrote tenth 007 book, The Spy Who Loved Me, as a ‘cautionary tale’ because ‘young people were making a hero out of James Bond’. Tied into this is the changed world in which Bond was operating. Fleming began work on Casino Royale just six months after the disappearance of British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. The two men would not be publicly confirmed as having defected to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics until 1956, but it was immediately widely assumed that they had been double agents, something that engendered national humiliation and anger. The members of the Cambridge Spy Ring, as it became known, were not the square-jawed types of espionage fiction but turncoats allied to one of the most monstrous regimes in modern history. With the changes created by this occurrence to public assumptions about heroism and the upper classes, Fleming would seem to have concluded that Bond could not be depicted as operating in a black-and-white world. Ethical ambivalence was now the order of the day. Bond had a clear morality about right and wrong in geopolitical terms – he hated the cruelties of Communism – but on a personal level made what many would consider transgressions, whether it be sleeping with married women or cold-bloodedly dispatching defenceless enemies. This in turn fed into a sense of modernity. That Bond was not a practitioner of the Queensberry Rules or an un-nuanced yes-man made him both an antidote to the stiff, Establishment figures of many previous spy books and attractive to a wider demographic. Even working-class people sceptical of values that they felt benefited only people in a higher income bracket could relate to a fornicating rule-bucker.
While with the above ingredients Fleming may have just been updating or refining already existing – if not necessarily commonplace – espionage elements, there are some things about his work that genuinely were revolutionary:
1 PROCEDURAL: Fleming’s naval espionage knowledge, though not always directly transferable and though not acquired from working in the field, provided a verisimilitude of protocol, mentality, terminology and backdrop. Moreover, where he needed more land-based expertise, he could rely on his brother Peter, who had worked in military intelligence during the war. Where Fleming had no direct knowledge or handy source to tap, he did his research, having meetings with, and sending out letters to, experts on relevant subjects and even allowing them to read through early drafts of his manuscripts.
2 TEXTURE: Because Fleming intended Bond as a cypher, he gave his character almost none of his own aesthetic bent, the type of which led to his amassing a culturally significant collection of first-edition books. However, that Fleming was a sensualist was written all over his Bond texts. Where previous writers would, in order to keep the action going and the cliffhangers coming, gloss over or even dispense with specifics of clothes, food, drink, travel and surroundings, Fleming would explore his hero’s observations and experiences in rich, leisurely and even digressive detail. Action and setup took an incongruous back seat.
3 VULNERABILITY: Despite occasional ruthlessness, Bond does not exult in violence in the manner of the likes of Templar or Drummond. He often ruefully reflects on having had to engage in it. Additionally, although good at his job, he is by no means a preternaturally poised operative, cheating death through serendipity as often as by ingenuity or bravery. He is also in the habit of availing himself of Benzedrine to sharpen his reflexes.
4 SALARY MAN: Perhaps Fleming’s most interesting departure from the espionage genre is the fact that his protagonist was not a freelancer. Bulldog Drummond and the Saint were adventurers of independent means, the American ‘gumshoes’ were self-employed, the protagonists of the works of Buchan and Ambler were often hapless ordinary people caught up by chance in forces beyond their understanding. There had, of course, always been salaried policemen and government spies in thrillers. However, rarely, if ever, had there been a man like 007. Bond got entangled in the most outrageous adventures, but they resulted from his job as a civil servant and, like anybody who answers to an employer, he was subject to rules, process and routine. For a society that universal education and decreasing deference had made more knowing and less credulous, this placing of the hero within the same exigencies of existence with which the average mortal had to contend was an intriguing and pleasing step forward. Moreover, Bond’s government job raised the stakes: his missions involved not some common-or-garden delinquency but risk to the world order.
Despite his background knowledge, Fleming’s depiction of espionage work was in no way the most authentic. Even the convincing procedural detail that often led up to his fantastical developments and denouements were sometimes nonsensical. For instance, Duns observes, ‘In real-life espionage, you already have your intelligence officer or officers in the city involved and have a network of people all over the world. When there’s a crisis in Paris, then the person who speaks fluent French who’s been in Paris for three years deals with it. The idea that you send in this one guy into all these places all over the world – that’s a fantasy premise.’
However, the espionage paradigm Fleming created was the one to which the world took more than any other. From a point within around half a dozen years after Bond’s entrée, every espionage story would be compared to Fleming’s tales and, later, the films derived from them. It therefore came to feel the most natural paradigm even if it wasn’t the most authentic. The shadow it cast over the genre was so huge that spy novelists and filmmakers to this day fight off accusations of imitation when they adhere to it, and are perceived to be almost comically self-conscious when they deviate from it.
That was then. Today, sex is ubiquitous, gambling is legal, global travel and brand names affordable and lack of deferentialism pretty much the norm. If published for the first time today, the values of the Bond books would not inspire the wonder they once did.
But, then, the mantle of the James Bond paradigm for espionage tales was long ago passed from the books to the films, which – as well as distributing it more widely – heightened it, stylised it, sanitised it and continuously updated it. One could even make the claim that Fleming deserves little credit for the James Bond cinema construct, which was already largely out of his hands even before his death and which has been expanded, traduced, refined and toyed with ever since. Nonetheless, the essential idea of Bond purveyed by his creator – a preternaturally able, unusually handsome, sexually voracious, epicurean British secret agent granted a licence to kill by his employer – has survived all the upheavals and redrawings of approach necessitated by box-office returns, alterations in actors and changes in cultural standards across the course of half a century. This must count for something in terms of Fleming’s legacy, to say the least.
As must one thing missing from the above list of ingredients in Fleming’s Bond books: high-grade writing. The genre wasn’t necessarily bereft of such before Bond. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and several post-World War II novels by Graham Greene are espionage tomes few intellectuals would be ashamed to have on their bookshelves. In an unusually non-self-deprecating comment, Fleming stated that his objective was ‘thrillers designed to be read as literature’. He would never have been so immodest as to state whether he felt he had been successful in this object, but he assuredly was. He managed to weld the outlandish plots of pulpier writers to the smooth-flowing, economical, evocative and often exquisite prose style of the type of novelists who won literary awards.
While Fleming’s skill may be irrelevant to the millions who continue to flock to Bond films – most of whom have probably never read a Bond novel – it’s to be doubted that Bond would have become a filmable proposition without the springboard to mass public attention provided by the author’s classy template.
Moreover, the original literary incarnation of Bond has a purity and legitimacy no film – however well made – can ever claim. Not for nothing did, post-Roger Moore, ‘I went back