The Man with the Golden Typewriter (15 page)

11th March, 1958

Many thanks for your most interesting and expert letter of February 16th which I have just come back to find waiting for me.

The trouble about writing these books is that one cannot possibly satisfy all the various experts on their particular subjects, and all I can do when in doubt is to submit the passages concerned to somebody who should know.

In the case of the racing sequence in “Diamonds are Forever” the person in question was William Woodward Jr., the owner of Nashua, who was subsequently shot by his wife in very grisly circumstances, and you may notice that the book is dedicated in part to him.

However, I do not question your excellent reasoning and I only wish you had been within reach when I was writing the book!

As to your point about the girl, all I can suggest is that you should try making love to a girl on the Dunlopillo mattresses of the Queen Elizabeth. You would then know why I chose the floor.

On the other hand I must plead guilty to the Bofors passage but, although this was read for me by a gunnery expert from Hythe, I admit he was rather an elderly one and I dare say your points are legitimate.

I greatly enjoy these tough comments from my readers and hope you will stir up your librarian so that in due course I may receive some more sharp criticisms to help keep me up to the mark.

 

6

From Russia with Love

The summer of 1955 was uncommonly hot in London. It was even hotter on the East Coast of America, where for a month the thermometer stood between 90 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit and office workers were beginning to strike for air-conditioning. ‘After a flying visit to the United States, return to our “heat wave” is an indescribable relief,' wrote Fleming on 28 August. ‘The wilting man in the street has no conception of the suffering in American cities . . . New York is a city almost on its knees and Washington, where the humidity is Amazonian, is prostrate.'

A week later, however, he was in Istanbul and it was here that the heat of 1955 reached tinder point. On 6 September, during a single night of violence, Muslim citizens turned against their Greek Orthodox neighbours in a display of ethnic hatred not seen since the great population exchange of 1923 that saw 1.5 million Greeks expelled from Turkey. So widespread and violent was the insurrection that it took an entire army division complete with cavalry and Sherman tanks to restore order. Fleming was at hand to witness it.

He had been invited to report on the 24th General Assembly of Interpol which was being held in the city as a nod to Turkey's recent acceptance as a member of NATO. The agenda was guaranteed to appeal, covering as it did drug smuggling, counterfeit cheques, forged fingerprints and a host of other nefarious activities. But fascinating though these subjects might be, they were of remote interest compared to the immediacy of the riot.

‘Several times during that night,' Fleming wrote later in the
Sunday Times
, ‘curiosity sucked me out of the safety of the Hilton Hotel and
down into the city, where mobs went howling through the streets, each under its streaming red flag, with the white star and sickle moon. Occasional bursts of shouting rose out of the angry murmur of the crowds, then would come the crash of plate-glass and perhaps part of a scream.

‘A car went out of control and charged the yelling crowd and the yells changed to screams and gesticulating hands showed briefly as the bodies went down before it. And over all there was the trill of the ambulances and the whistling howl of the new police cars imported from America.'

It was all very different from his usual journalistic fare. True, he could not resist frivolities such as the forthcoming 30th annual summit of the ‘Association of Former Eunuchs' (membership twelve; down considerably since its foundation) and an apology from the Burmese Interpol delegate who regretted that his was a backward country which had no sex crimes though it hoped to catch up with the West next year. But for a moment Fleming was on the front line in a way he had not been since reporting from Moscow as a young recruit to Reuters in the 1930s.

The city fascinated him. Apart from its antiquity and aura of romantic decrepitude, it had long been a mecca for spies. While its espionage heyday had been in the Second World War, its situation on the fringe of the Eastern Bloc meant that it remained a centre of intrigue. He loved, too, the fact that it was still the final destination of that most evocative of trains, the Orient Express (on which he travelled). All things considered, it was an ideal place to set his next adventure.

From Russia with Love
saw Bond being lured to Istanbul to meet a beautiful Soviet defector, Tatiana Romanova, who was willing to deliver a top-secret decoding device on condition she was escorted to safety by 007. Needless to say, it was a KGB honey-trap – orchestrated by the splendidly unappealing Colonel Rosa Klebb – whose aim was both to kill Bond and humiliate the Secret Service. To compound the disgrace, the agent of Bond's annihilation was to be the KGB's most prized operative, a psychopath from Ireland named Red Grant.

The writing seduced effortlessly. Every detail was vivid, whether it was the sweat that trickled down a KGB agent's face as he filmed Bond making love to Romanova, a man emerging from Marilyn Monroe's lips through a trapdoor set in a poster advertising her latest film, or the tunnel from which Bond raised a periscope to peer through a mouse hole in
the Russian embassy's skirting board. The characters were no less colourful, ranging from the sinister, powdered Klebb to the menacing Red Grant and the larger than life Darko Kerim, head of Station T, who headquartered himself in a tobacco warehouse and whose staff comprised a multitude of sons by various mothers.

Unconventionally, Fleming started the book with a long description of Grant – who ranks as one of his most carefully imagined villains – and even less conventionally he ended it by killing his hero. After a tense battle on the Orient Express, during which he managed to despatch Grant, Bond tracked Rosa Klebb down to a hotel in Paris. But the apparently harmless old lady was equipped with poison-tipped knitting needles. When Bond tried to draw his Beretta it snagged on the waistband of his trousers, forcing him to fend her off with a chair. Her needles clattered harmlessly to one side. Her shoes, however, were equipped with poisoned blades and when 007 was on the cusp of victory she gave him a sharp kick in the leg. As the venom made its way through his system he collapsed. This, it seemed, was the end of Bond.

‘I took great trouble over this book,' Fleming wrote on the flyleaf of his own copy. He had, too, and it showed. But if he had been hoping to use
From Russia with Love
to step off the Bond treadmill he had chosen the wrong moment. Enthusiasm for 007 was gathering apace and, as letters flowed in from a disappointed readership, it seemed that he had little option but to continue.

All this, however, was to come and as the summer of 1955 slid gradually into the cold British winter of 1956 he flew to Goldeneye where he stacked a ream of foolscap on his desk and, during the months of January and February, set his typewriter ringing.

TO C. D. HAMILTON

Life at the
Sunday Times
was becoming increasingly stressful, as an ageing Lord Kemsley began to lose interest, and its overworked staff began to feel the strain. Kemsley would eventually sell the paper in 1958, an event which Fleming perhaps anticipated in a letter to his friend and colleague Denis ‘C. D.' Hamilton, who was currently recovering from an illness.

25th August, 1955

I have just got back from New York where I sweated it out for three weeks to find your splendidly cheerful and ebullient letter.

It is wonderful that you are gradually clambering out of the valley but you simply must make staying out of it your first priority by ruthlessly delegating work in all directions and by taking real rests at week ends.

It is absolutely fatal to go home each night with a brief-case loaded with bumpf. This ruins your health and your private life and leads, in case you didn't know it, to a dread disability known as “Barristers' Impotence” which I am sure you will wish to avoid.

So far as the office is concerned things will have to get worse before they get better and it would be much preferable to reserve your energies for the day when new policies are forced upon us by events rather than exhausting yourself with frustrating efforts to try and arrest the slide.

Dinner last night alone with K[emsley] and Lionel made me more than ever aware that there is absolutely no hope of our revitalising the machine at the present time or altering its inevitable progress towards the edge of the abyss.

For the future the main danger is that we may be so exhausted or frustrated that when the time comes to take a new view the zeal and the enthusiasm may no longer be in us.

But as I have said it is for that day that you should wait and meanwhile put your feet up on the desk and whistle for a wind.

Meanwhile hurry up and get well and reduce your handicap and make love to Olive, who must be wishing poor girl, that you had stayed in the army which is a far less hazardous career than the appropriately situated W.C.1.

TO ANN

In a letter that seems to have been written during the course of five consecutive gin and tonics, but was in fact spread over several days, two countries
and different bottles, Fleming sent Ann a heartfelt and gossipy message of love, in which he also announced he had started work on his next book. She declined to come to Goldeneye that year. Ostensibly the reason was her fear of flying, but in reality the marriage was beginning to fray.

Goldeneye, Jamaica, January 1956

My love,

How different my writing looks from the others you get – from Peter [Quennell] and Evelyn [Waugh] and Hugo [Charteris].
¹
That is the sort of thing one thinks about after 3 gins and tonics and 3 thousand miles of thinking about you. It was horrible leaving the square. I said goodbye 3 times to your room and stole the photograph of you and Caspar. It's now behind a bottle of Aqua Velva in
our
bedroom so as not to be blown down by the wind. Things blown down by the wind worry me. For what it's worth, which, at this writing – as they say in America – is not very much to me, Jakie Astor flew with me to America.
²
Vacuum in New York. It's a dead, dreadful place and I loathe it more and more. The Bryces were very suspicious about your absence. What had happened? Jo [Bryce] said you were the only woman I had ever loved and ever would. Good? Bad? I said, as I say to everyone, that you are coming later. NANA has changed. It doesn't belong to them any more. I took some money out. Do you want a fur coat? What shape? What fur? I might get thin to smuggle it. Draw a picture. Give your measurements. Spent the night with the Bs. I
love
Ivar. I can't help it. He
needs
me (4 gins and tonics!) Second night alone in Grand Central Station Oyster Bar. What do you think I do when I'm abroad? Well I don't. I sit alone. In fact, I believe you'd rather I didn't. Any person rather than no person. (I'm beginning to write like Hugo. It's an obsession.) T. Capote was on the
Avianca
. Just
arrived from Moscow. Suitcase full of caviare for the Paleys
³
who have built a house beyond Round Hill. V. sweet and nice, loves you. Fascinating about Russia. Met the real jet set there who loved him. Found beautiful powder blue Austin on arrival. Drove through dark. Beach miraculous after 4 weeks. Norther ½ moon. Very sad without you. Today started book. Got two conches but no fun as you weren't there and sea
crawling
with lobsters. Also no fun. V. nice new gardener called Felix. It's a wonderful place and I can't sell it but you
must
be here. It belongs to you and you're stupid not to come here. You
must
get rid of your fears of things. Your fears of things are as bad as my fears of people.

(5th gin and tonic and goodnight my darling love and come if you possibly can) I love you only in the world.

TO ANN

Goldeneye, Jamaica, Saturday [11 February 1956]

My darling Treasure,

Truman Capote has come to stay. Can you imagine a more incongruous playmate for me? On the heels of a telegram he came bustling and twittering along with his tiny face crushed under a Russian Commissar's uniform hat. I told you he had just arrived from Moscow. Anyway it appears he couldn't stand the Round Hill life with the Paleys and Minnie and Co and just came to me to be saved and write his articles for the
New Yorker
. Anyway here he is till Tuesday and of course he's a fascinating character and we really get on very well though when I gave him a lobster without a head to carry this morning I thought we were going to have another Rosamund act.
⁴
But he was brave and went off with it at arm's length. It has poured with rain since he arrived on Thursday and is
still crashing down. Just taking him off to Noël for drinks and dinner. Ah me. Anyway the book is half done and buzzing along merrily in the rain.It is now Sunday and I'm in the garden between showers and spells of hot sun. The Noël evening was typical. His Firefly house is a near-disaster and anyway the rain pours into it from every angle and even through the stone walls so that the rooms are running with damp. He is by way of living alone up there and Coley
⁵
has to spend half his time running up and down in the car with ice and hot dishes of quiche Lorraine! A crazy set-up. N. is going to sell Goldenhurst and Gerald Street and become a Bermuda citizen! So as to save up money for his old age. I can see the point but I expect the papers will say some harsh things.

Write again quickly. Your letters are wonderful and long.

I love you,

Ian

Truman and everyone send their love.

FROM WILLIAM PLOMER

Sunday 1st July, 56