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How does Bond keep it up?
Ian Fleming's sadistic, snobbish Cold War tales are the latest Penguin Modern
Classics - and the secret of their success lies in the way they anticipated the world
of
bin Laden
Christopher Hitchens
Sunday March 17, 2002
The Observer
There are many reasons for the immense adhesiveness of the 007 classics, and one
of these reasons is certainly the loving attention paid to what we now term the
'designer' aspect of culture: the brand name and logo and product-placement
element that, nowadays so pervasive as to be wanting in any sort of style, was quite
a daring refreshment in the post-austerity 1950s.
And, like the famous gadgetry dreamed up for him by Q, Commander Bond was
'designed' in his turn, as a lone hero of 'the West'. Not for Fleming the moral
ambiguities and shady compromises of a Graham Greene or John le Carré agent:
the West was coterminous with the Free World and that was - with a few very
occasional moments of chivalrous doubt - that. Every line that he composed was
either overt or subliminal propaganda for the great contest with communism, and all
of the subordinate themes, from racism to sadism, were ancillary to it.
The novels were written, and sometimes set, in the Caribbean. Indeed, Fleming
annexed the blunt name James Bond from the author of the principal guide to
Caribbean ornithology. He even approached his Jamaican summer-home neighbour,
Sir Noël Coward, to play the part of Dr No in the first Saltzman-Broccoli movie
extravaganza: Coward's icy plea of other business must have been quite something
to behold, as indeed, would have been his rendition of the role.
The West Indian archipelago is important here because it was one of the few regions
of the globe where British imperial pre-eminence still rivalled that of the emergent
United States. Ian Fleming was a 'special- relationship' man by necessity, because of
the imperatives of anti-communism. (During the Second World War, he visited
Washington for British naval intelligence and composed a long memorandum on the
means by which London could help the Americans establish their own secret
agencies.)
But, like many with connections to 'the Service', he was by no means a special-
relationship man from the cultural point of view. Bond reacts with infuriated disgust
when Tatiana Romanova compares his good looks to those of an American film star
('For God's sake. That's the worst insult you can pay a man!') and, in a little-
remembered story entitled 'The Quantum of Solace', is sympathetic to the Cuban
rebels whose cause he has been sent to sabotage.
A compromise is eventually reached by way of Bond's gruff affection for the brash
CIA man, Felix Leiter, but it is generally to be understood that British resolve, pluck
and integrity are worth far more than their equivalent weight in Yankee cash and
technology. (General Vozdvishensky, in the course of the great conference of
conspirators that opens From Russia With Love, is of the same expert opinion.)
Thus, when Bond rescues the ingot-lined vaults of Fort Knox from contamination at
the close of Goldfinger, he is beating the Americans not just at their own game but
on their own turf.
Incidentally, or perhaps coincidentally, the American millionairess who married Lord
Curzon - at the height of matrimonial alliances between such English dynasties as
the Churchills and such American families as the Vanderbilts and Astors - was
named Mary Leiter. It's therefore rather fitting that Sir Anthony Eden should have
taken refuge in Fleming's Jamaican home at Goldeneye, to try to recuperate after
Washington had essentially pulled the plug on British imperialism at Suez in 1956.
Surviving this debacle, Fleming paid another visit to Washington in 1960, met the up-
and-coming presidential nominee John F. Kennedy, and proposed to him various
schemes for the elimination of Fidel Castro. By March 1961, Life magazine was
reporting that From Russia With Love was number nine on the new boy- President's
top 10 list of favourite books.
The staying power of the books, especially of these three classics, is, however, partly
and paradoxically attributable to their departure from standard Cold War imagery.
Bond confronts not just the unsleeping evil of Moscow-directed communism, but also
a metastasised sub-species of monsters in human form who are, in some sense, in
business on their own account. This is the case most obviously with Dr No and Auric
Goldfinger, but it applies also to the psychopathic killer Donovan Grant in From
Russia With Love. He is a twisted former Sinn Feiner who fails all his party exams in
ideological matters and is eventually classified as 'Political value Nil. Operational
value Excellent'. By some latent intuition, Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold
War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the
Colombian cartels, Osama bin Laden and, indeed, the Russian Mafia, as well as the
nightmarish idea that some such fanatical freelance megalomaniac would eventually
collar some weapons-grade plutonium.
'Cold War' has since rightly become a term of cliché, and of Manichaean cliché at
that, but for those younger readers who may have a safer grasp of the cliché than
that of the reality there is no surer way of recreating the mental and moral
atmosphere of that period than a British dip in Bond-infested waters. Who now
remembers the absolute hatred official Anglo-Americanism felt for the France of de
Gaulle, that weak and treacherous element within the Western alliance? In
Goldfinger and From Russia With Love, the cross-Channel neighbour was
represented as perfidy incarnate, and honeycombed with communist sympathy at
every level.
At least two large implausibilities result from this: the ghastly Rosa Klebb takes the
unnatural risk of appearing in Paris in person to confront her nemesis, and
Goldfinger buries a bar of gold in a French provincial riverbank - surely a most
cumbersome way of delivering a subsidy - in order to finance local subversion.
But, as against these improbable digressions, la Klebb is also described as having
won her spurs during the Spanish Civil War, and even as having been the double-
crossing lover of POUM leader Andres Nin. This showed a far more detailed
knowledge of Stalinist machinations on Fleming's part than can have been required
by most of his readers. His insider's finesse, in matters of detail such as the use of
Bulgarian surrogates by the Russians, was an essential constituent of his credibility
and helped to mask the plot weaknesses past which he hurried the reader. (Come
now: can you say you understand how Bond contrives to get that life-saving cigarette
case between his breastbone and Donovan's unwavering gun muzzle?)
>From Russia With Love, Dr No and Goldfinger represent the Fleming gold-standard
in point of having the best-realised villains, the best assassins and the best girls.
(I
remember Kingsley Amis saying that Crab Key was the most exciting fictional setting
he had ever come across.)
The secret to all three successes lies in a peculiar kinkiness of Fleming's own
character: he brings off his grotesque effects by making the evil-doers not physically
repellent so much as sexually repellent. Rather cleverly, as with Goldfinger himself
and Donovan and Dr No, the suggestion of a certain asexuality sometimes does the
trick of making the flesh cringe. In other instances, most notably that of Rosa Klebb,
the stress falls on perversity and inversion, though it should be noted that the ill-
named Pussy Galore acquits Fleming of the charge of gay-bashing.
On questions of androgyny, it might be said, he swung both ways. Indeed, Coward
wrote to him teasingly after reading the passage in which Honeychile Ryder's rear
end is described as temptingly boyish. 'I know we are all becoming progressively
more broadminded nowadays but really, old chap, what could you have been thinking
of?'
One wonders how the old trouper reacted when or if he scanned the outline of
Tatiana Romanova's bottom: 'A purist would have disapproved of her behind. Its
muscles were so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward
feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted
like a man's.' (Miss Pussy Galore is, perhaps for good and sufficient reasons, never
approached a posteriori.)
One also wonders how the man who wrote and sang 'Matelot, matelot' would have
reacted when reading this: 'Bond sat down and looked across into the tranquil, lined
sailor's face that he loved, honoured and obeyed.' In the late 1950s, the male-
bonding element in the British Secret Service had not become the comic standby that
is such a staple of subsequent non-fiction.
Fleming took his sadism seriously and lingered voluptuously on the elaborate
rehearsals for death by torture. Time after time, when a swift shot to the back of the
head would have rid them of their nemesis, Bond's antagonists prefer to sit him down
(or tie him down) and speak lasciviously of the ghastly fate that has been concocted
for him, not forgetting to give their own game away in the process. This lip-licking
ingredient is essential to the recipe; it also serves to obscure weakness in plotting
and it illustrates what I call the principle of reckless disregard that powers so many
thrillers on page and screen.
Just as the villains show scant concern for their own security, so Bond repeatedly
endangers himself and forgets all tradecraft. (Stay on the train after he has escaped
from Istanbul and evaded his pursuers? Only for the sake of the story.)
I touched before on Fleming's chivalrous contrast between individual gallantry and
initiative, and the weight of organisation and bureaucracy. He has asserted this
against the Americans, and also against the Soviets. The charming and dashing
figure of Darko Kerim, one of the best-etched Golden Horn intriguers since
Greenmantle, provides another occasion for the comparison:
'Bond turned away. He reflected briefly on the way the Russians ran their centres -
with all the money and equipment in the world, while the Secret Service put against
them a handful of adventurous, underpaid men, like this one, with his secondhand
Rolls and his children to help him. Yet Kerim had the run of Turkey. Perhaps, after
all, the right man was better than the right machine.' (The 'secondhand Rolls' is an
especially telling detail.)
Somebody once said that all Englishmen can be divided into Roundheads and
Cavaliers. Bond is pre- eminently a Cavalier, both as a blade and as a political
animal, right down to his royalism (and the royalism of his housekeeping 'treasure',
the prim Scotswoman 'May', who might have hidden Bonnie Prince Charlie in the
heather). Yet, like May indeed, and also his adored M, he also possesses some of
the stuff of a Puritan. His deep nature is disapproving and anti-modern, suspicious of
hedonism and decadence. Even his philandering has its aspect of misogyny. Thus,
and to come back to where I began, his identification with baubles and affectations is
one of the small ironies of the conflict between him and his creator.
'Adolescent' was the term that the foes of both Bond and Fleming used to deploy.
That and, of course, 'snobbery'. Snobbery with violence, in fact. Paul Johnson, who
denounced Dr No on publication for its supreme nastiness, also committed himself to
the view that the books were 'very second-rate snobbery - not even the snobbery of a
proper snob - it's a snobbery of an expense-account man'.
Seldom can social unease have revealed itself so blatantly in the guise of social
assurance. It is true that the Bond classics cater to male adolescents. At my
boarding school, they were the only fictions that one could be certain everybody had
read. But for Fleming to have brought off this achievement is to have captured an
audience and struck a chord, and to have become the Buchan of his time (and
perhaps have held the position longer).
Nostalgia, however, is not the special feature of either the adolescent or the snob,
and so the books can now enjoy a second life with their redolence of the days when
the pound was worth a pound (and nearly four dollars), the Times did not print news
on its front page, the Channel had no tunnel and Britain, through the agency of at
least one dedicated and underpaid volunteer, could 'punch above its weight'.
· Taken from Christopher Hitchens's introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics
edition of From Russia With Love, Dr No and Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, published
on 4 April at £10.99.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
End<{{{~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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