” We have all the time in the world”, James Bond tells his novel wedding Martin in 1969’s” On Her Majesty’s Key Service”, both times before and after she dies at the hands of Bond’s rival Ernst Stavro Blofield. However, like Tracy, Bond’s creator—a beautiful, stressed, complex writer who died at 56—never had as much time as he, or we might include liked.
This biography is the first one that the Fleming estate has authorized. It gave English writer Nicholas Shakespeare unrestricted access to both the correspondence of his subjects and the remains of his beloved family and friends. In Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an engrossing and definitive biography, we encounter the man in full, contradictions and all.
Fleming’s compatriots remember him as a “moody, harsh and withdrawn person, habitually rude and often cruel”,” the most generous, least malicious, most merry, yet most melancholy man I ever knew”, “most emphatically not a snob” ( his wife, Ann ),” a real snob” ( Sean Connery ),” completely and utterly irresistible to women”, and someone whom “nine out of ten women could n’t stand”. How could one person contain such multitudes?
The British Intelligence Machine
Shakespeare begins by examining the Fleming clan’s paterfamilias, Robert, a wildly successful self-made financier. In the late 19th century, Robert Fleming rose out of Scottish lowland poverty and established a significant bank in the City of London. He conducted business with J. P. Morgan and other titans.
His son Valentine, Ian’s father, joined the upwardly mobile and self-abnegating fin-de-siecle English striving class, attending Eton, befriending Churchill’s younger brother Jack, joining the family business, and winning a seat in Parliament. Eve, a boisterous and outspoken social climber who bore him four sons, was his wife. Ian was the second.
The courageous Val, a major in the Oxfordshire Hussars who had already survived several shellings, returned to the battlefield in France and was subject to heavy German bombardment in the Somme in 1917. In the Times, Churchill eulogized him. A bereft nine-year-old Ian maintained the proverbial stiff upper lip and soon followed his late father’s example, enrolling in Eton, where he excelled athletically but not academically. After graduating from Sandhurst’s military academy, he moved to the Austrian town of Kitzbuhel, where an expat English couple welcomed him.
Aimless and floundering, the teenaged Fleming found love, writing, and inner peace in the Alps. Alfred Adler, a well-known psychologist and Freud acolyte, who placed him in the hospital to treat his infamous” second-child syndrome,” a sense of inferiority to his vengeful older brother Peter, was the subject of his own diagnosis.
A more confident, mature, and self-aware Ian returned to London, where he began reporting for Reuters, training that he found “much more valuable to me than all the reading in English literature I did at Eton” and that “taught him to write fast and above all be accurate”. His assignment took him to Moscow, where he covered a notorious 1933 Stalinist show trial in a number of articles that gained him respect and instilled both a knowledge of and a hatred for the authoritarian Soviet system. ( He was also sent to Berlin to report on Hitler’s triumphant election as chancellor. )
Ian landed a partnership with a city company and lived a charming bachelor’s life in Belgravia when his grandfather passed away and left nothing for his branch of the family. However, as the Nazi storm advanced, Fleming found himself called to the service and, at some point in the late 1930s, applied for and received a commission in naval intelligence.
Even now, nearly 90 years later, his role in the secret service remains shrouded in secrecy. According to Shakespeare, he consults military historians who have made the unanimous judgment that he “was at the very center of the British intelligence apparatus.” He’s even credited, persuasively, with influencing the Americans ‘ decision to create the Office of Strategic Services.
Specifically, Commander Fleming created and ran the Number 30 Assault Unit, nicknamed 30AU. It was a group of daring commandos who penetrated enemy lines to secure ciphers, encoding machines, and confidential documents, including during the D-Day invasion. The top-secret Nazi naval materials they rescued from the storied German castle in Tambach in the final days of the war, days before the Soviets arrived, were one of their most significant discoveries. While Fleming’s wartime travels never put him directly in harm’s way, he lost many close to him, including school friends, men under his command, other Service colleagues, and, worst of all, his younger brother Michael, who fell during the Dunkirk evacuation.
The Bond series was largely born out of this conflict. Fleming’s boss, Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, whom he praised for his “brilliant, unconventional, and labyrinthine mind”, was unmistakably the model for” M”, Bond’s handler and superior. Many of their ( reported ) stratagems involved the use of deception and gadgetry, as well as the hiring of unsavory characters ( Guy Ritchie’s most recent film,” The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ), which features all of these motifs and features a young Fleming working in the Admiralty behind the scenes ).
James Bond was even given the role of a lieutenant who saved Peter Fleming from a disaster while conducting his own secret intelligence-gathering operation in Greece during the war. A historian of Fleming’s unit would later say, of the 007 books,” They work because he’s a storyteller. They have strong, convincing foundations. What we consider to be inventive is a component of his naval acumen. Shakespeare puts it differently:” By converting his lived experience into fiction, he released the burden of that knowledge”.
The essential Western hero
Shortly after VE Day, Fleming made a civilian appearance. He accepted a lucrative position with the Mercury newspaper group, which also owned the Times and other publications. It allowed him to continue to travel widely and, Shakespeare suspects, continue spying, however informally.
But scandal soon cost him both his vocation and a wife: his patron, the Viscount Kemsley, learned Fleming’s adulterous relationship with Ann Rothermere when her aristocratic husband revealed it to his friend Kemsley, who essentially disowned Fleming. When Ann divorced and found herself pregnant with Fleming’s child, Caspar, they wed.
In parallel, Fleming had grown besotted with Jamaica and purchased a modest bungalow on its north shore that he christened Goldeneye, a property that would later entertain the likes of Graham Greene, Truman Capote, Lucien Freud, Errol Flynn, and Evelyn Waugh. In 1952, Fleming recreated James Bond, a composite of the numerous figures who had populated his both professional and personal lives.
Beginning with Casino Royale, he would sell millions of copies of his fast-paced, gripping thrillers that would later become beloved movies over the next 12 years until his sudden death. Bond became the quintessential Western hero: famously elegant, dashing, audacious, clever, and committed to defending freedom.
At first, the series did n’t really take off. Of the first five Bond books, none sold more than 12, 000 copies in hardback, and by 1955, he had earned less than £2, 000 in royalties, forcing him to hold on to his dead-end job at the Times. He planned to murder Bond and disliked” that ass” him.
Then good fortune struck: the 1956 Suez Crisis drove an addled Prime Minister Anthony Eden to convalesce at Goldeneye, and the publicity rocketed Bond to instant popularity. The Express agreed to publish the next book in serial form, and From Russia with Love, which became available, sold tens of thousands of copies. Bond’s fame migrated stateside in 1960 when a young Massachusetts senator running for president, “mesmerised” by Fleming, invited him to Georgetown for an extended discussion. JFK claimed in a statement to Life magazine that he had ten of his favorite books from Russia in mind ( he and RFK even plotted with Fleming outrageous assassinations ).
After that, it was off to the races: Thunderball‘s first U. S. printing sold out in a week. A massive movie deal with United Artists followed, with a little-known, charming, and charismatic working-class Scottish actor named Sean Connery chosen to play the hero. ” Dr. No” opened to massive success in 1962, juicing sales of the other Bond books and related merchandise, including toothpaste, snorkels, and even lingerie. Other blockbusters followed, and the franchise flourishes into the 2020s. By some estimates, more than half the world’s population has seen a Bond film, and more than 100 million of his books have been sold.
Fleming was hardly able to enjoy his success. His and Ann’s marriage was troubled from the start, with both spouses conducting long-running affairs. They argued over money ( even with the money from the books and movies, they spent millions on the renovation of a Wiltshire manor ), the agitated Caspar ( who would later commit suicide ), and pretty much everything else.
He fell out with Kevin McLory, the ne ‘er-do-well Irish producer to whom he’d assigned early film rights, who failed to deliver, and who, embittered, sued Fleming. He experienced depression especially later in life when he commissioned from friends ‘ entries into The Gloom Book. These struggles, along with copious smoking and drinking, exacted a heavy toll on his health, largely incapacitating him and contributing to his premature demise. He succumbed to heart disease in 1964 after one final round on his beloved Royal St. George’s golf course.
Bond’s Remarkable Longevity
Like Fleming, Shakespeare’s crisp prose, combined with his many chapter breaks ( 70, across 700 pages ), propels the narrative across his subject’s short but highly eventful life. Shakespeare also casts light on underappreciated aspects of Fleming’s career, including that 007 was originally named” James Secretan”, Fleming sold to MGM for £1 the rights to a storyline that would become” The Man from U. N. C. L. E”. and, later,” Charlie’s Angels”, Lee Harvey Oswald adored the series and so did the president he assassinated, and Fleming was an avid if secretive collector of rare, first-edition books.
The book also successfully appraises its subject’s cultural and geopolitical importance. ” It is impossible to overstate]Fleming’s and Bond’s ] quite extraordinary influence in making something English seem important in the 21st-century world. James Bond has a stature to which no modern prime minister, nor royal, nor indeed anything can lay claim”, historian Max Hastings tells Shakespeare.
The timing of Bond’s emergence, too, was no coincidence. ” Britain had lost an empire”, Shakespeare writes of the 1950s and early 1960s, “yet all at once, through Bond, it discovered a different way of being reunited with the world”.
Finally, the remarkable longevity of the series demonstrates the creator’s and her hero’s unwavering virtues. In some quarters of the post-modern world, integrity, daring, loyalty, and patriotism may be dead, but in the highly entertaining and profoundly inspiring literary and cinematic universe Ian Fleming created—so deeply rooted in the heroic, multifarious author’s personal and professional upbringing and so adroitly documented here by his extraordinary biographer—they still reign supreme.
Michael M. Rosen is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an attorney and writer in Israel. Reach him at [email protected].
