Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (18 page)

Perhaps Ann takes too much credit. Ian had packed his twenty-year-old ‘Imperial portable’ typewriter, and on passing through New York ten days earlier had purchased a ream of best-quality folio writing paper from a shop on Madison Avenue. The intention to write was already there.

On around 17 February, he sat down at his desk in Goldeneye’s main room, plucked a name from the author of
Birds of the West Indies,
whose book sat on his shelf, lined up his ream of smart paper and started to write. So began Bond, with the claustrophobic first line of
Casino Royale
: ‘The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.’

When later asked what inspired him to create James Bond, Fleming’s stock answer – much to the annoyance of Ann – was that he started writing to take his mind off the ‘hideous spectre of matrimony’. It fact, that was only part of a wider crisis for Ian that included concerns about money, his health, and the state of his country and empire.

The Conservatives, led by Winston Churchill, had returned to power at the end of 1951 on a platform that included a more assertive and independent foreign policy and a ‘strengthening of the resources of the Empire in order to close the dollar gap’. But their mandate was small – a majority of sixteen seats, with less of the vote than Labour – and there was no promise to roll back the Welfare State so disliked by Fleming. Churchill was a much-diminished figure from the wartime colossus, and some felt he should have given way to the next generation of Eden, Macmillan and Butler.

In the meantime, a series of blows had fallen on the Empire. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, owner of the world’s biggest oil refinery, at Abadan, was taken over by the Iranian government; in Egypt, nationalists were attacking British troops in the Canal Zone; Cyprus made a bid for independence; nationalists were victorious in elections in the Gold Coast; in recognition of Britain’s declining reach, Australia and New Zealand made a security pact with the United States.

Worst for Fleming, though, was the seismic shock delivered to the British intelligence services and the country as a whole by the disappearance in the summer of 1951 of two British spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had been tipped off by a mysterious ‘Third Man’ (correctly identified by the Americans as Kim Philby, British intelligence’s liaison man in Washington). There were strong suspicions – later proven correct – that Burgess and Maclean were traitors and had fled to Moscow. British intelligence was in crisis.

On a more personal level, Fleming’s impending change from bachelor to husband and father threw up a number of challenges. Ann had secured a £100,000 divorce settlement from Rothermere, but nonetheless, Fleming was presented with the need to provide for a wife with expensive tastes, and, of course, a child. His salary from the
Sunday Times
was generous, but so had been his bachelor expenditure. For his lifestyle to be maintained, along with these new drains on money, a fresh source of income was required.

Over the previous two years, Ian had made strenuous efforts to rent out Goldeneye during the ten months he was not there. In this he had had some success, but barely enough to cover the costs of the place, as ‘the house runs away with money all through the year’. So as well as everything else, he needed Bond to pay for Goldeneye.

Also under threat was his personal space, the aloof loneliness he had wallowed in for so long. From the very first, Fleming established a routine for his writing at Goldeneye. Retreating inside, he closed the large wooden jalousies, shutting out the noisy colour of the garden,
the views of sea and sky, the calls of birds and the crash of the surf on the reef He didn’t discuss what he was writing with Ann, nor did she ask to see any of it. Thereby he managed to maintain a private, self-regarding space, even when his bachelor pad in Jamaica was being thoroughly invaded by the looming proximity of marriage and fatherhood.

The maleness of that space he created at Goldeneye is, of course, in black and white on the pages of the books, starting with
Casino Royale.
‘These blithering women, who thought they could do man’s work,’ Bond exclaims at one point. In
Casino Royale,
we learn too from Bond about the nature of relationships for men like him: ‘the lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement’. Women are for ‘entertainment’ only, although preferably with a violent twist – ‘brutally ravaged’. In fact, in his detachment Bond is outdone by his lover Vesper, who is given the line: ‘People are islands. They don’t really touch. However close they are, they’re really quite separate. Even if they’ve been married for fifty years.’

It all came out very fast, poured on to the page. Ann later commented that Ian ‘wasn’t very anxious to start, but once he’d begun, of course, he found himself enjoying it, and he finished the book in a great burst of enthusiasm’. This first novel was finished at the latest on 18 March, possibly even earlier, which meant an average of more than 2,000 words a day. Out of reach of the delicious cooling sea breeze, it must have become very hot inside shuttered Goldeneye. But the prospect of a refreshing dip in the bay would have been a great reward for a target reached – just another thousand words! Fleming later declared that the ‘main thing is to write fast and cursively in order to get narrative speed’. It was fatal to start criticising what you had just written, he advised. Instead, you just had to keep going. Awful bits could always be corrected later. (In fact, the manuscript of
Casino Royale
shows more subsequent changes than any other of his books.)

Almost all the Bond books would be written at a similar rate, and sometimes it shows. For
Casino Royale,
however, Fleming clearly had key scenes well thought out before he sat down in front of his typewriter. The card game between Bond and Le Chiffre would remain, many books later, one of his finest creations. Le Chiffre is the secret paymaster of a communist-controlled union in north-west France, ‘an important fifth column in the event of war with Redland’. (It was a time when dissent in the unions and in the colonies was often blamed on ‘communist influence’.)

But Le Chiffre has lost the union’s funds in a private venture and needs to recover the money promptly or face retribution from SMERSH, the ‘efficient organ of Soviet vengeance’. He has elected to do this by playing high-stakes baccarat. To prevent him winning, and thereby cause his destruction, M, the head of the British Secret Service, sends his organisation’s best card player, James Bond, to take him on at the casino of Royale-les-Eaux, a high-end resort on the French Channel coast. Bond is to be supported by a French agent, Mathis, as well as by the CIA.

Bond’s cover in France is as a ‘Jamaican plantocrat whose father had made his pile in tobacco and sugar and whose son chose to play it away on the stock markets and casinos’. He signs his name in the hotel register as ‘James Bond, Port Maria, Jamaica’. He is also to be controlled from the island, receiving instructions via a ‘taciturn man who was head of the picture desk on the
Daily Gleaner,
the famous newspaper of the Caribbean’. A friend of Bond’s from Jamaica, ‘Charles DaSilva of Chaffery’s, Kingston’, has agreed to pretend to be his attorney, ‘if inquiries were made’.

It is assumed by the Frenchman Mathis that part of Bond’s Jamaican cover should be ‘hot blood’ (a persistent stereotype of West Indian Creoles) and thus the companionship of an attractive escort. What is more natural than that you should pick up a pretty girl here?’ he asks. As a Jamaican millionaire what with your hot blood and all, you
would look naked without one.’ Enter Vesper Lynd, named after the drink Fleming had enjoyed at the strange Great House at Duncans. Vesper is assistant to the head of Station S (Soviet Union), and Bond, although preferring to work alone, is immediately ‘intrigued by her composure’ and ‘excited by her beauty’ – particularly her ‘fine breasts’.

In spite of all precautions, Bond’s cover is already blown. His hotel room is bugged, and he must survive an assassination attempt by a pair of Bulgarians (‘“They’re stupid, but obedient. The Russians use them for simple killings’”), as well as a gun in his back during the game itself.

Nonetheless, he takes on Le Chiffre, who watches him during the game ‘like an octopus under a rock’. Afterwards, Vesper is kidnapped and Bond himself is captured trying to rescue her. In one of Fleming’s most explicit scenes, Bond is then tortured by having his testicles beaten. He survives to consummate his flirtation with Vesper, but is left at the end with a desire for vengeance against SMERSH, and a broken heart belied by the savage last line of the book: ‘The bitch is dead now.’ (We learn in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,
written ten years later, that he still makes an annual pilgrimage to Royale-les-Eaux to visit Vesper’s grave.) With heartbreak and vengeful anger fuelling the tank, James Bond is launched.

The Bond who emerges from Fleming’s first take on his hero is at once old-fashioned and modern, austere and decadent. He is highly professional and expert, but an aficionado of sensual enjoyment, taking ‘a ridiculous pleasure in what I eat and drink’. His name, anonymous and sleek, differentiates him from his Clubland Hero predecessors, all the Carruthers, Berties and Algernons, though he, like them, thinks and talks in sporting analogies such as ‘bowled out’. When, years later, Fleming was asked about the influence of Buchan and Bulldog Drummond, he declared that ‘the old days of the hero getting a crack over the head with a cricket stump have rather gone out’. It was ‘ridiculous’, he said, to go on writing thrillers in the old way ‘when life
has come on so fast beside us’. But in
Casino Royale,
Bond very nearly meets his nemesis from a gun hidden inside a walking stick, which is not so far removed from the cricket stump.

Kingsley Amis said that Bond wasn’t an aristocrat because he didn’t drink port or sherry. Neither are his vodka martinis a pint down the pub. Bond doesn’t hunt or sail, but he’s also uninterested in a working-class sport like football. His are the consumer sports – skiing, golf, gambling – open only to those with money but relatively free of old class assumptions.

Like the sunseekers of Jamaica’s ‘Gold Coast’, Bond moves in spaces that are rich, for sure, but becoming increasingly classless. Outnumbering the lords and maharajas at the casino table in Royale are a Belgian who has made a fortune in colonial Congo, a Greek shipowner, sundry rich Americans, including a flaky film star, and a young Italian ‘who had probably had plenty of money from rackrents in Milan’. It is the newjet-set, classless, always abroad, detached from where they are, feeding their appetites. It is Bond’s milieu: he is a new hero for the jet age.

Detachment is an important part of Bond’s charm. His power and charisma come from his combination of style and isolation; he treats women with ‘a mixture of taciturnity and passion’. His character has coldness, cynicism and ruthlessness, but he is constantly trying to control and conceal his emotions and suppress his appetites. Mathis says, ‘I don’t think Bond has ever been melted.’ But Fleming reveals of his hero that, ‘like all harsh, cold men, he was easily tipped over into sentiment’.

Above all, though, Bond is soaked in a disconcerting psychological unease, his face ‘ironical, brutal and cold’. Like Fleming, he enjoys staring out to sea, ‘lost in his thoughts’.

Like Fleming also, Bond loves cars, and smokes Morland cigarettes in the same quantity – ‘Bond lit his seventieth cigarette of the day.’ He also matches Fleming’s own prodigious alcohol consumption,
although without the attendant health problems beginning to bother his creator. Peter Quennell reckoned that James Bond incorporated Fleming’s ‘passion for speed, his taste for mechanical devices, his masculine hedonism and restless energy’.

Aside from the character of the hero, other distinctive elements of the Bond novels to come are laid out in
Casino Royale
for the first time. The villain is of mixed race, ‘probably a mixture of Mediterranean with Prussian or Polish strains’, as they almost all would be. Le Chiffre, like many of Bond’s adversaries, is also physically unusual and repulsive, with overlarge false teeth and ear lobes, and moist yellowish skin, a ‘flagellant’ with a ‘large sexual appetite’.

Then there are the detailed, lip-smacking descriptions of conspicuous luxury consumption and lifestyle – cars, hotels, wine and food, including caviar, lobster and foie gras. We learn about Bond’s special self-authored cocktail: ‘three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.’ The bar staff are honoured to follow these expert instructions; then Bond helpfully advises that grain-based rather than potato-based vodka would make the recipe better. For 1953’s rationed and skinflint Austerity Britain, this was pure delicious escapism, just as Fleming’s sojourns in Jamaica were for him.

But while
Casino Royale
launches a recognisable Bond, and a recognisable style, it remains somehow different from the rest of the novels. It is at times clunky in its exposition, and has an unsatisfactory structure, with an overlong coda after the gruesome climax of the action. But it also has a claustrophobic tension not experienced again until the much later books. It is rawer and less polished than later Bond novels, as perhaps we should expect of a first attempt, but at the same time it seems more nuanced and subtle than much of what would follow. (For Raymond Carver, it would remain the best Bond novel.)

The shadow of the real-life Burgess-Maclean treachery that hangs over
Casino Royale
makes it perhaps the closest Fleming came to a Le Carré-style spy story. The plot addresses the disastrous infiltration of MI5, with the twist in the tail being the exposure of a mole at the heart of the Secret Service’s Station S. We also have the American view on the newly revealed unreliability of the British Secret Service. When Bond meets Felix Leiter for the first time, he senses a certain reserve behind the American agent’s charm: ‘Although he seemed to talk quite openly about his duties in Paris, Bond soon noticed that he never spoke of his American colleagues in Europe or in Washington and he guessed that Leiter held the interests of his own organization far above the mutual concern of the North Atlantic Allies. Bond sympathized with him.’