Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (40 page)

Getting nowhere with the ‘stale’ arguments, Ian suddenly decided he needed to go to Jamaica. On the BOAC flight to New York, he scribbled a note to Ann: ‘In the present twilight we are hurting each other to an extent that makes life hardly bearable.’ All his efforts to make her happy, he said, were answered by ‘a string of complaints. When I want to do the things I enjoy, as this sudden trip to Jamaica, that is also a cause for complaint. You have had to get another man for a dinner-party! … can you wonder that I’m fed up to the teeth? But for my love for you and Caspar I would welcome the freedom which you threaten me with.’ He was exhausted, he said, and needed to ‘regain some spirit, which, though you haven’t noticed it, is slipping out of me through my boots’. From New York, he cabled Blanche to meet him at Goldeneye for a ‘honeymoon’. He told her he was leaving his wife.

Blanche as ever was on hand with undemanding adoration and kindness. ‘He was sick and so miserable in his marriage,’ she says. ‘I looked after him. Jamaica and me: we could have kept him alive.’ But after only a week, a cable arrived from Ann saying she was dangerously ill. Fleming delayed, but Blanche persuaded him he had to return to her bedside. Ann recovered from what turned out to be a minor operation, but the marriage remained exhausting and trying for them both.

During the time he did manage to spend in Jamaica, however, Fleming wrote what Blanche calls his most autobiographical story. ‘Octopussy’, like ‘Quantum of Solace’, is not really about Bond. Instead the focus is on Dexter Smythe, a golf-loving retired special operative who after the war, seeking to escape bad weather, austerity and the Labour government back home, moves with his wife Mary to Jamaica.

Many years later, Bond arrives at Wavelets, Smythe’s north-shore house (with stairs to a beach and reef), to investigate an old crime.
The body of a ski instructor and mountain guide has been found in the Alps. It turns out that Major Smythe, in the course of tracking down Nazi records and hideouts at the end of the war, had stumbled on a cache of gold. He had killed the guide who helped him reach it, and then smuggled the bullion to Jamaica, where he’d done a deal with Chinese traders in Kingston to sell it off gradually. Bond skilfully gets Smythe to confess, then hints that it might be better all round if the Major dies before being taken back to Britain for trial. In the event, Smythe goes out on the reef, where he is killed by a combination of a scorpion fish – ‘far more dangerous than barracuda or shark’ – and his reef pet, Octopussy.

But this is really a story about alcoholism. For their first years in Jamaica, the Smythes enjoy an ‘endless round of parties’, ‘cheap drinks’ and ‘lazy, sunshiny days’. They both put on weight. Then he has a heart attack and is told to cut down on his cigarettes and alcohol. ‘At first Mary Smythe tried to be firm with him; then, when he took to secret drinking and to a life of petty lies and evasions, she tried to back-pedal on her attempts to control his self-indulgence. But she was too late. She had already become the symbol of the janitor to Major Smythe and he took to avoiding her. She berated him with not loving her any more and, when the resultant bickering became too much for her simple nature, she became a sleeping-pill addict.’ After a flaming row, Mary takes an overdose ‘just to show him’, but it kills her.

The story opens two years later. Smythe, like Fleming, is in his early fifties. He is slightly bald and his belly sags; he is now just ‘the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man who had made easy sexual conquests all his military life’. Although with the help of ‘a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cumberbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore’, he ‘had nothing but contempt for the international riff-raff with whom he consorted’.

He has now suffered a second heart attack and ‘it was a mystery to his friends and neighbours why, in defiance of the two ounces of whisky and ten cigarettes a day to which his doctor had rationed him, he persisted in smoking like a chimney and going to bed drunk, if amiably drunk, every night’. He takes pills to go to sleep and more pills in the morning to deal with his hangover. On the day Bond arrives, Smythe has started drinking at 10.30 a.m.: brandy and ginger ale – what Fleming calls ‘the drunkard’s drink’. (This is also Bond’s choice in
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,
and Fleming’s, too, when he was interviewed by a magazine the following year.) By half past eleven, Smythe is lighting his twentieth cigarette of the day.

‘Dexter Smythe had arrived at the frontier of the death-wish,’ Fleming explains. ‘General disgust with himself had eroded his once hard core into dust.’ Only one thing in his life keeps him from swallowing ‘the bottle of barbiturates he had easily acquired from a local doctor’. ‘The lifeline that kept him clinging to the edge of the cliff’ was ‘the birds and insects and fish that inhabited the five acres of Wavelets, its beach and coral reef beyond. The fish were his particular favourites.’ With his snorkel and Pirelli mask, he spends all his time ‘stirring up the sand and rocks for the bottom feeders’, ‘breaking up sea eggs and urchins for the small carnivores’, and bringing out ‘scraps of offal for the larger ones’. ‘He knew them all intimately, “loved” them and believed that they loved him in return.’

Six months later, in January 1963, Ian was back in Jamaica, and after the filming of
Dr No
found himself something of a local celebrity. The
Gleaner
sent a reporter to Goldeneye to interview him. When you see “Doctor No” you will be proud of the Jamaican actors,’ Fleming pronounced, claiming that he had urged the directors to use as many locals as possible. When asked if he would write another book with a Jamaican setting, ‘he said with a chuckle, “I can’t go on plugging
Jamaica like this or my public will think I have shares in the Jamaican Travel business.”‘ (He did, however, manage a plug for Jamaican cigars in his current book,
You Only Live Twice.
) He was then asked to comment on one of the ever-present issues in Jamaica – race and colour. ‘That is rather getting into the realms of politics,’ he replied, ‘but I am very happy the way things are going, the way we are becoming what we basically are – brothers. As far as I am concerned, the colour problem does not exist.’

The interviewer found the main room of Goldeneye ‘loaded with spear fishing and underwater diving equipment’. But according to Ann, Ian, although ‘far better here’, was ‘alas, unable to prowl the reef’.

Ann herself had suffered a series of blows. Ian had continued to take every opportunity to see Blanche – on one occasion in New York, another in Austria and several times in England. More seriously, Ann’s brother Hugo was very ill, and her sister Mary Rose had lost her long-running battle with alcoholism. Two days before Christmas, she was found by one of her children dead in her bed, having drunk, on an empty stomach, the best part of a bottle of brandy. Ann wrote to Evelyn Waugh that Mary Rose had had ‘no contact with the present and death was a merciful relief’. Then ‘Heavenly’ Hugh Gaitskell was taken into hospital, having suffered a collapse. Ann was desperate to visit him, but also did not want to upset his wife, Dora. In the meantime, Ian’s latest visit to his own doctor had produced the information that he had at most five years to live. After agonising over the decision, Ann elected to go with Ian to Jamaica. Gaitskell died on 18 January. Soon afterwards, Ann wrote from Goldeneye to Clarissa Eden: ‘I mind very much more than I could have imagined.’

Somewhat unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, the 1963 visit saw the production of one of Fleming’s darkest and strangest books.

In mid November 1962, Fleming had travelled to Japan to research
You Only Live Twice.
As ever, he was curious about everything. Visiting
Mikimoto’s Island, he had alarmed one of the young girls diving for pearls by gently rubbing her shoulder. ‘You must touch to get the precise texture of wet feminine skin,’ he explained.

Since the murder of his wife at the end of the previous novel, Bond has gone into a severe decline. Even a month off in Jamaica after Tracy’s death hasn’t helped. ‘He’s going slowly to pieces,’ M tells Sir James Malony, the Secret Service’s nerve specialist. ‘Late at the office. Skimps his work. Makes mistakes. He’s drinking too much …’ (‘It was three thirty,’ Bond tells himself at the beginning of the book. ‘Only two more hours to go before his next drink!’) Bond has bungled his last two missions and is facing the sack. Malony replies that Bond has admitted to him that ‘all the zest had gone. That he wasn’t interested in his job any more, or even in his life.’ He then suggests that as Bond is a ‘patriotic sort of chap’, an especially difficult and important mission might help him ‘forget his personal troubles’.

So Bond is sent to Japan on a diplomatic mission to persuade Tiger Tanaka, the head of the Japanese secret service, to reinstate an arrangement to share intelligence. To save money, the British had been closing down operations in the Pacific, relying instead on the CIA. But high-profile defections and arrests for treason had made the Americans wary of passing on secrets. (While Fleming was still writing the book, the news broke of the defection of Kim Philby.) Britain is ‘a now more or less valueless ally – an ally now openly regarded in Washington as of little more account than Belgium or Italy’. M comments about Tiger Tanaka, ‘He probably doesn’t think much of us. People don’t these days.’

When Bond raises the purpose of his mission Tanaka taunts him: ‘You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands … when you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, your governments have shown
themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day’s work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so much admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde … whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family.’

‘The liberation of our Colonies may have gone too fast, but we still climb Everest and beat plenty of the world at plenty of sports and win Nobel Prizes,’ Bond replies, somewhat lamely.

To prove that Englishmen are still to be reckoned with, Tanaka challenges Bond to kill Dr Guntram Shatterhand, who is luring Japanese people to his bizarre castle of death to commit suicide with the help of his collection of poisonous plants, fish and snakes. Shatterhand turns out to be Blofeld, and Bond is on a mission of revenge.

Of course, the more Britain faded, the more outstanding and exemplary Bond became, the individual bucking the trend. The
New York Times,
reviewing the book, noted that ‘Bond’s mission is aimed at restoring Britain’s pre-World War II place among the powers of the world. And on that subject, above all others, Ian Fleming’s novels are endlessly, bitterly eloquent.’

But Bond himself is not immune from decline. When out diving for shells with the novel’s love interest, Kissy Suzuki, his joints crack and ‘he had to admit to himself that his lungs were in a terrible state’. While hiding in a shed in Blofeld’s ‘garden of death’, the urge to smoke gets so strong that he puts his life in danger to have a cigarette.

The completion of his mission leaves Bond with a severe blow to the head that causes amnesia. Kissy doesn’t tell him about what he earlier called his ‘dark and dirty life’, and they enjoy an idyllic
time living simply and fishing. (M assumes he is dead and writes his obituary.) The undemanding lover and simple life cannot help but remind us of Blanche and Goldeneye. But then something triggers a memory, and Bond is dragged back to the ‘real world’.

You Only Live Twice
is overburdened with the travelogue material Fleming had gathered on his trips to Japan, and reviewers complained that ‘some of the old snap seems to be gone’. Although it was perhaps Fleming’s weakest novel, it was also the most successful so far for his publishers, Jonathan Cape, when, after the success of the first two films, it was published in March 1964 with pre-orders topping 62,000 copies.

It is the least revised of any of the completed novels, an indication of Fleming’s fading energy. In mid 1963, a friend noted that he ‘looked like death, time-worn and gaunt’. But, she later commented, ‘Ian always was a death-wish Charlie.’ (In
You Only Live Twice,
Tanaka describes Bond’s hard-drinking Australian friend Dikko Henderson as ‘a man who lives as if he were going to die tomorrow. This is a correct way to live.’) Nonetheless, in May Fleming flew to Istanbul for the filming of
From Russia, with Love,
and in the summer travelled in Europe. At the premiere of the second Bond film in October 1963, he took his doctor along with him in case of emergencies.

The following month, the McClory case over
Thunderball
reopened. Ann joked in a letter to Evelyn Waugh that it was good for Ian as he could not smoke in court and was only able to take an hour for ‘a simple’ lunch. But it was draining, and the pains in his chest and his hypertension were getting worse. After a couple of weeks, Ivar Bryce settled with McClory out of court as he could see the case was worsening his friend’s health still further.

A month later, Bryce suggested that he and a Chicago friend join Ian at Goldeneye in January ‘for a last bachelor visit’. Ian replied, ‘Your vastly welcome decision was vastly welcome.’