The Man with the Golden Typewriter (44 page)

As to BOND STRIKES CAMP, this outrageous riot really deserves the maximum circulation and if the London magazine is really prepared to take the chance of printing it I think you should let them take it. It would become a collector's piece within hours and the much wider distribution would add greatly to the publicity value for Bond.

I hear that DR. NO has already reached the top flight of the year's most successful films.

FROM NOËL COWARD, Blue Harbour, Port Maria, Jamaica, W.I.

29th March, 1963

Mon Ever So Cher Commandant,

I really am very very ‘Proudfull' of you. O.H.M.S.S. is, to my simple, unsophisticated mind, far and away the best you have done yet. In the first place there is much more genuine characterization than usual and I believed all of them. In the second place the ‘action' parts although they go far, do not go too far and are terrifically exciting without straining the credibility to excess. In the third place it is really brilliantly constructed and all the Heraldic stuff and the discussion of biological warfare are very lucid as well as being most impressive. Whatever Mr Franklin may say I, for one, am extremely worried about the Great South African Land Snail even if he isn't.

Of course as an accurate picture of daily life in the Alpine Set it may leave a little to be desired. All jolly joking aside it really is very very good indeed and I only finally put it down so that Coley could pick it up.

Another thing that made the book especially glorious for me was my discovery, on page 34 of a gratifying bit of careless raportage [sic]. In the game of Chemin de Fer dear boy, unlike Snakes and Ladders to which you are obviously more accustomed, there are certain immutable rules.
Bond couldn't
possibly
have lost to a One with a Buche of
two
Kings. The English lady
must
have asked for a card as she would hardly stand on a one. In that case Bond would have turned up his cards and also drawn one so he must have had a ‘Buche' – to coin a phrase – of THREE court cards or tens. I hate to have to point these little errors out to you but you are getting a big boy now and in writing about the gaudy pleasures of the Upper Set, which I have adorned so triumphantly for more years than you, you must
try
to get things straight. Incidentally there is now only
one
mention of Fairy Tale in my lyrics so sucks to you.

My time here is drawing to a close and I hate the idea of it. Joyce, Hopie, Coley and I drove over Hardware Gap and stayed at Strawberry Hill which we loved. It was redolent of proudfull memories of you and the Ex Lady Rothermere. It was staggeringly beautiful but a bit nippy after dark.

Listen now. Ed Bigg, my Chicago doctor who really is the most sensible doctor I have ever encountered, came to visit
with
me on a holiday – vacation – with his wife. We had a long discussion about smoking which he is
dead
against (He gave it up himself some years ago and there is a little conscious virtue mixed up with this). Anyhow I told him that, for creative people who had the habit badly, it was a really dreadful deprivation to have to stop it. Then he told me that the clever Americans manufacture a cigarette with virtually no nicotine in it at all called SANO. You can get them King sized or ordinary. The King sized are better. They haven't much taste but they most emphatically do the trick. I had two cartons sent from New York. Would you like me to bring you some on April 16th or better still cable to New York for some yourself. You
may
even be able to get them in London. Personally I never intend to smoke anything else. Of course they haven't got the kick of Senior Service or any of our Virginian cigarettes but they're very like Lucky Strikes or Philip Morris or any of the ordinary American brands. And you will soon get used to them. If you get the ordinary size smoke them with Aqua filters because they are not as tightly packed as the King size. Although I've been brave and heroic to cut down to five or six smokes a day it
has
been a bore and a strain, and to be able to smoke now without a sense of guilt is really a tremendous relief. Do have a bash. It is the demon Nicotine that is the trouble and buggers
up the veins and arteries. I've been into the whole business with great care and am now as merry as a grig.

I shall be here until the 7th and then New York 404 East 55th street.

You were jolly sweet to send me the book and I would like to go on about it much more when I see you. I find that some dreary strangers are suffering ptomaine at Goldeneye and so I can't use the beach. What a bore you are.

Love and kisses to you and your poor old Dutch.

[PS] I would have preferred ‘Pis
du
Chat' to ‘Pis
de
Chat' but one can't have everything.

TO MICHAEL HOWARD

23rd April, 1963

It is really ghastly, I have never made so many mistakes in a book in my life as in OHMSS.

I am not blaming anyone but myself, apart from one or two very minor literals.

Anyway, I am being deluged with letters from people ticking me off because Raymond Mortimer said how wonderfully accurate I was in my books!

Here now is a total list of all the corrections which should go into the next edition, and I am hastily sending a copy off to Ed Doctorow,
¹¹
who is editing the book in NAL, in the hope that he can check them all in time for the American edition, otherwise I shall get a fresh deluge of brickbats.

For your next edition would you please be very kind and see that all these corrections go in, and also make certain Pan has a list or, at any rate, the correct Cape edition from which to print.

So sorry for all this, and I have recently spent a couple of hours with one of the stupidest Japanese in existence trying to make sure that we won't get Arthur Waley
¹²
on our tail over the next book!

TO THE EDITOR, THE SUNDAY TIMES, Thomson House, Gray's Inn Road, London, W.C.1.

2nd April, 1963

Sir,

I am being deluged with enquiries as to why James Bond should dress his hair with pink tooth-powder. This misunderstanding arises from Mr. Raymond Mortimer's most generous review of my opuscula in which the late Mr. Trumper's “Eucryl” appears instead of his “Eucris”. (In fact Bond uses nothing on his hair and the Eucris featured only in M. Draco's spare-room bathroom.) And your rendering of Bond's “Attenhofer Flex” ski-bindings as “Attenborough Fox” in Mr. Mortimer's most kindly reference to my efforts to achieve accuracy has resulted in one scornful winter sportsman suggesting I take a refresher course at Zermatt.

Could it be, Sir, that a sub-cell of SPECTRE is building up in your literary department?

 

16

You Only Live Twice

The winter of 1963 was the worst Britain had suffered for more than 150 years. In January, the snow rose twenty feet high, blocking railways, roads and waterways. Ice extended so many miles from the coast that people wondered if the English Channel would freeze over. In February conditions deteriorated further, with more snow and gale-force winds. At Oxford somebody drove a car across the Thames. And in Goldeneye, at a steady 80º Fahrenheit, Fleming was writing about Japan.

Fleming had been fascinated by Japan ever since he visited Tokyo in 1959 while researching
Thrilling Cities
. During that first trip he had met the redoubtable Australian journalist Richard Hughes – ‘Dikko' to his friends – who guided him through the niceties of oriental culture with blasphemous gusto. Another contact had been the journalist Torao ‘Tiger' Saito. Both men were there to greet him at Tokyo airport when he arrived in November 1962 to spend two weeks collating material for his new book. The result, over which Fleming was now toiling cheerfully in the Caribbean, was called
You Only Live Twice
.

Following the death of his wife Tracy, Bond is in decline: drinking, gambling and turning up late for work. As a last chance M equips him with a new number, 7777, and sends him to Japan on a diplomatic passport to effect an information exchange with ‘Tiger' Tanaka, head of Japanese Intelligence. Instead, however, Bond finds himself on the trail of his nemesis Blofeld, now installed in a remote castle under the name Dr Guntram Shatterhand. Here, with his repellent assistant Irma Bunt,
he tends a garden in which every flower, every bush, every ornamental pond, is deadly. Helium balloons surround the castle, warning people to keep away while at the same time advertising that here lies certain death. Month by month scores of people come to commit suicide. With the assistance of Tanaka and an Australian intelligence officer ‘Dikko' Henderson, Bond is given a make-over as a mute coal miner from the north of the country and installed in a coastal village with the family of Kissy Suzuki, an actress turned pearl diver. With her help he infiltrates the castle and after several narrow escapes manages to kill both Blofeld and Irma Bunt before escaping on one of the helium balloons. Winged by a bullet from one of the guards he drops hundreds of feet into the sea. When rescued by Kissy Suzuki, it is as an amnesiac, with no recollection of his previous life. Settling down with her he works as a simple oarsman on her fishing boat. But at one point he sees the name Vladivostok in a newspaper. It stirs something inside him and he feels compelled to go there in search of his past. Behind him, though he does not know it, he leaves Kissy several months pregnant. Back in London he is categorised as ‘Missing Presumed Dead' and is duly given an obituary in
The Times
.

While in Jamaica Fleming had a lapse in spirits. Pondering his ever weaker health, he wrote to Dikko Hughes that Bond had ‘had a good run, which is more than most of us these days. Everything seems a lot of trouble these days – too much trouble. Keep alive.' When Hughes remonstrated, Fleming replied, ‘Dikko, I promise. Don't worry. I'm not worrying any more. Down with death.' Despondent or not, Fleming managed to pull it off once again.
You Only Live Twice
was, like its predecessor, a splendid book and with its vivid set pieces – including a torture chair set above a volcanic vent, which Bond subsequently blocked to destroy Blofeld's castle – showed his imagination running at full throttle. The obituary, too, provided fans with their first full explanation of Bond's origins. After the box-office success of
Dr No
he could not have poised 007's latest adventure more perfectly.

The screen version of
Dr No
had boosted Fleming's standing to such an extent that he and his creation had become household names: in June he was invited to appear on the prestigious radio programme
Desert Island Discs
; in Oxford a group of enthusiastic undergraduates had founded a James Bond Club; and across the Atlantic the
Harvard Lampoon
published a spoof Bond novel called
Alligator
which was so successful that it sold an astonishing 100,000 copies. Nor was there any sign of the acclaim abating, as, barely had the dust died down from
Dr No
, than Eon was on to the next one,
From Russia with Love
, which started filming in Istanbul that spring. Fleming, who flew there as an observer, was fêted with due reverence; but he must have reflected on the difference between this visit and his last. Back in 1955 he had been an intrepid reporter, roaming the darkened streets as all around him riots raged. Now he was a frail figure who struggled slowly over the cobbles, pausing every now and then to rest on a shooting stick.

In July came Percy Muir's exhibition, ‘Printing and the Mind of Man', or, to give its full subtitle, ‘A display of printing mechanisms and printed material to illustrate the history of western civilisation and the means of literary multiplication since the fifteenth century'. Fleming's contribution amounted to forty-four volumes, the largest showing by any private collector, and one of which he was immensely proud. An even greater accolade came when he was invited to be a member of the Committee of Honour. In a telegram to Percy Muir he wrote, ‘A THOUSAND CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR WONDERFUL CATALOGUE AND PARTICULARLY ON HAVING ELEVATED OUR COLLECTION TO THESE FANTASTICALLY PROUD HEIGHTS STOP I TRULY BLUSH WITH EMBARRASSED DELIGHT AND WITH WARM MEMORIES OF THOSE DAYS WHEN YOU TOOK ME BY THE HAND STOP GRUESS DICH GOTT IAN'.

What was more, his collection having languished for so many years in storage, he now had a library to put it in. That month he, Ann and Caspar moved into their new home, Sevenhampton Place, where one of Fleming's first acts was to install a wall of shelves. Here he arranged his first editions, each in a black box stamped with the family crest of a goat's head, and with labels colour-coded according to subject. Despite Ann's valiant attempts to make it a home, Fleming was never entirely happy with the place. The surroundings were unkempt and overgrown, with a lake whose mists he said encouraged mushrooms on his clothes.

A bright spot in his life was a Studebaker Avanti – left-hand drive, spanking new and freshly delivered from America – which he had put through its paces earlier that year on a drive to Lausanne to interview Georges Simenon. But even this wasn't enough to shake off a gathering sense of mortality. As Ann wrote, he was in a state of ‘permanent angry misery', and it was perhaps his own gloom more than anything else that cast a pall over Sevenhampton.

Professionally, he was a model of diligence. Despite instituting what he proudly described as ‘the Fleming three-day week', he continued to pepper C. D. Hamilton with article suggestions for the
Sunday Times
and even found time to knock out a Bond short story, ‘Property of a Lady', for Sotheby's house magazine
The Ivory Hammer
. The plot was simple. On finding an undercover spy in the department, M sends Bond after her paymaster. Her payment, it seems, is to be financed by a Fabergé egg, one of the few still held by the Soviets, which has been smuggled into the country and is due to be auctioned at Sotheby's. Bond scours the auction room and as the hammer falls at £155,000 spots the final bidder. Although it was perfectly well written, Fleming felt the piece wasn't up to standard and refused to accept any money for it.