The length of Nicholas Shakespeare’s history of James Bond father Ian Fleming, which is almost 700 pages long and contains almost another hundred notes, is the first thing to be a surprise. The following disturbing aspect is that they are all required.
Shakespeare does go on a topic or two, but in addition to giving us a photograph of the liberal wealthy after the Second World War, when it seemed all knew everyone else and was able to find a political candidate traveling in downtown D.C. Fleming worked in banking, journalism, publishing, and, during the war, the Naval Intelligence Division. The number and variety of people he knew is incredible.
He went to school with George Orwell, Anthony Powell, and Harold Acton. He was companions with Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Alan Pryce- Jones, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, among people. He knew—and hated—the artists Lucian Freud. He and his wife initially resided in the Carlyle Mansions above T. S. Eliot and John Hayward, but he attracted Hayward to alter his 1952 publication The Book Collector. Fleming and John F. Kennedy met on an earlier trip to the United States in 1960. Kennedy and Fleming had supper together, evidently asking them about how they would control Cuba.
Winston Churchill was a close friend of his family, and Fleming was near to CIA chairman Allen Dulles. When Prime Minister Anthony Eden was looking for a place to rest after the Suez Crisis in 1956, he visited Ian Fleming’s Jamaican home. Other friends at Goldeneye, as Fleming named his Caribbean house, included Princess Margaret, Truman Capote, and Errol Flynn. When he quickly worked at the League of Nations in Geneva, he met Albert Einstein and went swimming with Jacques Cousteau in France.
On the surface, Fleming’s life seems charmed, but for the most part, he always lived up to the expectations of his mother or, afterwards, his wife, who thought his works were ridiculously raunchy.
Born in 1908 to Valentine Fleming and Evelyn ( Eve ) Ste. Croix Rose, Ian Fleming lived his younger years and most of his adult life in the darkness of his elder sibling, Peter, who excelled at Eton and Oxford and, eventually, as a travel writer and journalist. Ian left Eton, excelling merely in sports, and spent a year at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before being moved to Kitzbühel, Austria, where he had recently spent a summer with his spouse and writer wife, Phyllis Bottome. Ernan Forbes Dennis, a former intelligence official, and his mother, who was unsure of how to deal with her uncooperative and rebellious son.
The younger Fleming was instructed to study German and French at Kitzbühel in order to get ready for the Foreign Office test. Fleming’s keep first did not go well. After a disagreement with Bottome and a subsequent ultimatum, Fleming’s situation turned around, and he spent three years at Kitzbühel, where he not only perfected his German ( he translated Carl Jung’s lecture on Paracelsus ), but also significantly improved his French during a stay in Geneva. Although he was not chosen for the Foreign Office, his time on the continent was revolutionary, and he returned apartment a changed person who lacked a clear sense of direction.
Fleming’s father, Robert Fleming, was one of Europe’s richest people, making his fortune in the British railroad program at the end of the 19th century. Ian Fleming’s parents, Valentine, died in the First World War, and Eve immediately put tremendous pressure on her children to live up to an imagined picture of her late father.
After problems at Eton and Sandhurst, and after missing out at the Foreign Office, Ian got a job—with his family’s support —at Reuters. He excelled at media but lost out on a lot of money, leaving to pursue a career in finance. He was sad at trading, but he enjoyed his income and playing” the weak, irreverent … bachelor- about- town” while his brother made his mark on American letters. The younger Fleming found his standing just before the war started to break out.
What was a motley collection of experiences and skills—a stint in journalism, experience in banking, a good knowledge of German and French, a long list of connections in American higher society, and healthy charm—made him perfect for the role of personal assistant to the head of naval intelligence, John Godfrey. While Fleming never talked about his role during the war, Godfrey remarked after Fleming’s death that he was indispensable —” a war- winner“. According to Christopher Moran, who specializes in national security at the University of Warwick, Fleming “was not a desk officer, he was the desk officer. He knew it all, as a spy chief should, operating as a proxy spy chief for three to four years”.
Fleming used his network of journalists to provide information on the dealings of the Soviet Union to the British government after the war was over ( a great evil in Fleming’s opinion ).
He also negotiated with James Gomer Berry, the First Viscount Kemsley and the head of the Kemsley Newspapers, which owned the Times, to spend two months of every year in Jamaica, which he did from 1946 to his death in 1964. He wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, and it was published in 1953. Fleming continued to write a new Bond book every year for the next 12 years, but it was only a small success. From Russia, with Love, published in 1957, proved to be Fleming’s breakthrough work. In a Life magazine article, John F. Kennedy listed it as one of his ten favorite books. The first James Bond film, Dr. No, was an unexpectedly huge success in 1962 and made Fleming an international star.
Fleming lived a playboy life until an affair with Ann Rothermere, wife of Lord Rothermere, led to a pregnancy and a divorce. Fleming legally wed her, but the union ended badly. Ann was used to hosting parties for 400 people and she continued to do so, though on a smaller scale, hosting as many as” 180 luncheon parties and 210 dinners” one year.
Shakespeare writes that Ian “was as allergic” to his wife’s literary parties as” she was to his Bond”. She frequently made fun of his books and pressured him to write something more serious. Fleming enjoyed playing golf with friends while Ann was entertained, but because of his deteriorating health, it became increasingly difficult to do so. He died in 1964 at the age of 56 from a heart attack after lunch at Royal St George’s Golf Club. Before his passing, he had finished one final Bond book that his son’s friend had found among his possessions. When he showed it to Ann, she said,” Oh, Ian’s little booby”, and threw it in the fire.
After the war, Fleming gave readers a character who carried the flag of the British Empire even as it clearly declined and could do anything in uncompromising style, despite Ann’s dislike of Bond. He was a connoisseur, a man of the world, and through him, Shakespeare writes, “readers gain entry to a club that feels exclusive, of which they can be temporary members”. ( The real James Bond was an ornithologist—Fleming, an avid birdwatcher himself, happened to own his book. )
Fleming’s fans included Umberto Eco, Somerset Maugham, Elizabeth Bowen, Roald Dahl, Anthony Burgess, and Philip Larkin. Larkin remarked that the books showed” a personality much more complex, much more intelligent, much more imaginative than Bond ‘s—the personality, in short, of Fleming himself”.
Shakespeare captures that personality, too, as a complex man who desired more than what life gave him until he had it all, and it was too much.
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
by Nicholas Shakespeare
Harper, 864 pp.,$ 45
Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.
