In June 1957, with five successful Bond novels to his name and Dr No in the works, Ian Fleming displayed one of the unmistakable signs of megalomania: he began to write of himself in the third person, and as a brand. He also flaunted the Bond-like trait of an unashamed chancer, trying to write off his taste in sports cars as a business expense. “The success of Mr Fleming’s books has depended in considerable measure on their verisimilitude,” he wrote to his accountant, a certain HW Vallance Lodge, suggesting a possible line of attack against the Inland Revenue. Fleming had established his own company, Glidrose, at the very start of his Bond career, and surely, he argued, it shouldn’t be expected to pick up the tab for his deep literary research: “It might be thought extravagant that the company should have purchased a rather expensive sports car for Mr Fleming in preference to a modest family saloon were it not for the nature of Mr Fleming’s highly successful books. These are Secret Service thrillers in which the hero and other characters make frequent use of fast cars and live in what might be described as ‘the fast car life’.”
We do not learn how the inspector of taxes responded to this request, but we can now be sure that Fleming was cannily and obsessively concerned with protecting, boosting and complaining about his earnings throughout his career. His fear that he might be victim to some grand scheme of exploitation by his publisher, Jonathan Cape, seldom abates even at the height of his success. Fleming chose not to have an agent in the UK, and his negotiations with Cape are often blunt, wheedling and grasping, an approach one seldom associates with a writer of such public grandeur. In May 1953, for example, he was concerned that his royalties would only just keep his wife Ann “in asparagus over Coronation week… I do hope you will sympathise with my financial aspirations which, I am afraid, are serious.” Agent 007 would have shuddered at such pleading.
Fleming happily compared himself with the other big hitters of the day, Eric Ambler and Len Deighton. On this evidence he generally found plot construction or characterisation a breeze, and he treats his writing rather technically, a cerebral and strategic template for thrills and suspense. But he did struggle repeatedly with jacket designs and titles. Live and Let Die will always be one of the quintessential Bond calling cards, but it could easily have been The Undertaker’s Wind (a suggestion later relegated to a chapter title). Or how about The Inhuman Element or Wide of the Mark in place of Moonraker? Fleming also had rather tortured exchanges over marketing campaigns, more than once offering to contribute a large spend on his own promotion.
Fleming suffered mixed fortunes from the critics, although even scathing reviews seemed to have little impact on his soaring sales. Vulnerable, prickly and bullish, he judged his books primarily as entertainments, and was swift to respond to those who perceived a cruelty and inhumane chill in his writing.
In April 1958 he replied to accusations in the Manchester Guardian that his work exhibited dangerous signs of moral decay. “It is true that sex plays an important part in James Bond’s life, and that his profession requires him to be more or less constantly involved in violent action.” The intention, he argued, was to establish a particular depth of character, but maybe there were also psychological explanations: “Perhaps Bond’s blatant heterosexuality is a subconscious protest against the current fashion for sexual confusion.”
Fleming wrote fast – 14 Bonds in 12 years, in addition to Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang and three nonfiction titles – and his ambitions were never sated. The roots of his desires – for more acclaim, more money, more respect – may lie in his earlier privileged life or his wartime service as a naval intelligence officer, but we get few clues here.
The correspondence has been meticulously and compellingly edited by the writer’s nephew Fergus Fleming, himself no slouch in literary affairs (his nonfiction accounts of the earliest explorations of the Alps and the north pole are sharp and captivating, a bit of the old DNA spun through). Many of these letters have previously appeared in truncated form in the biographies, and it is a collection approved by the Fleming estate; there must have been a damnable chunk of material that didn’t make the cut. The copious correspondence surrounding a lengthy court battle over the origination of and rights to Thunderball, for example, is barely evident. That said, there is still so much here to amuse and inform, not least the tender relationship Fleming maintains with William Plomer, his editor at Cape, and Bond completists will delight in the subtle tweaks to early manuscripts. But it is Fleming’s replies to his picky readers that supply the most fun. There are many complaints about the author’s inaccuracies or unwise decisions – an unmanly choice of gun, an inconsistency in how Bond takes his coffee – and Fleming swats them away with dutiful appreciation and generosity (and, one imagines, inner seething). “As to your point about the girl,” he writes regarding a Diamonds Are Forever nitpicker, “all I can suggest is that you try making love… on the Dunlopillo mattresses of the Queen Elizabeth.”
All letters from self-regarding writers carry the big unknown: to what extent are they writing to the gallery with posthumous publication in mind? How often does the mask slip? Here, the most sobering and self-effacing appraisal of Fleming’s achievements emerges from his correspondence with Raymond Chandler, to which Fergus Fleming devotes a brilliant chapter. Chandler had written a review suggesting Fleming was squandering his talents, and it brings him up short. “Probably the fault about my books is that I don’t take them seriously enough,” Fleming responds, before simultaneously lowering his own pretensions and insulting his readers. “If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond… But I have taken your advice to heart and will see if I can’t order my life as to put more feeling into my typewriter.”
The ending is all rather sad. In May 1964, three months before his death, Fleming wrote to his paperback publishers Pan, regretting that he was not currently well enough to receive an Oscar-style statuette marking 1m sales of Casino Royale. Recovering from pleurisy and cursed with a weak heart, Fleming’s “fast car life” was far behind him, and his letters were now dictated. But the letters of his name were still not big enough. He complains to Pan that the mention of Sean Connery appears in a far larger type on a new edition of a book than his own. The book was Goldfinger.
A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited by Simon Garfield, will be published next month by Canongate. The Man With the Golden Typewriter is published by Bloomsbury (£25). Click here to buy it for £20
