This piece appeared in the TLS of December 1 1995
Andrew Lycett
IAN FLEMING
486pp. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. £20.
0 297 81299 8.
Ian Fleming, judging by this sober and detailed biography, was possibly the
most ghastly member of a circle and generation that offered strong
competition for the title. As an RNVR commander during the Second World War,
on one occasion he advocated the shooting of deserters out of hand, and on
another ordered a subordinate to murder three German admirals who were
prisoners of war; the subordinate protested and Fleming backtracked. He was
self-aggrandizing; after the war, when he was foreign news manager of
Kemsley newspapers, Frank Giles, later Editor of the Sunday Times, applied
to him for a job. Fleming was sitting in front of a map of the world covered
with flashing lights marking his foreign correspondents, which struck Giles
as "a fair old load of bullshit".
Fleming was sycophantic towards older men he thought might be useful to him:
Kemsley, Beaverbrook, Somerset Maugham. He was insufferably vain; invited to
check an article about himself, he amended a reference to the bow tie he
invariably wore to say that it was knotted with "Churchillian looseness".
Obsessed with sex, he designed his flat to facilitate seduction, boasted of
his conquests and ruthlessly discarded many of those he attracted. He
carried on a covert affair with Ann Rothermere while playing bridge with and
accepting the hospitality of her husband; after he married her, he was
consistently and almost immediately unfaithful. His tastes were vulgar;
having decided to collect first editions, he irritated his scholarly dealer
by spending money that he could have spent on books on black buckram cases
embossed with the Fleming crest. In mitigation, Andrew Lycett argues (on the
last page) that someone with his gift for friendship "cannot be all bad".
This is the second biography of Fleming. The first, by John Pearson, was
published in 1966, only two years after Fleming died, and initiated by the
Sunday Times, for which both men had worked. As Lycett gently points out,
that book not only helped to establish the myth of Fleming as the template
for James Bond, but also since Ann Fleming was still alive passed discreetly
over what Lycett politely calls Fleming's "emotional life". Many of
Fleming's old associates have opened up to Lycett, and he has had the
benefit of access to all Ann Fleming's letters and to Fleming's working
papers. This may explain why the book is perhaps too long; but Lycett is a
judicious writer who neither lets Fleming off too lightly nor censures him
without cause.
But for his phenomenal success with Bond, Fleming's life would be of scant
interest. As it is, 007 is lodged somewhere inside all our heads, together
with an uneasy feeling that the appeal of his crude clubland values and
sado-masochism tells us something disreputable about ourselves.
Fleming was born with every advantage. He was good-looking and athletic. He
had connections to bankers and politicians through his father's banking
family, which made a fortune in the last century, and to writers and artists
through his mother who, after her husband was killed in the First World War,
conducted a salon in Chelsea. After Eton, his mother arranged for him a
succession of jobs that did not suit him the Army, a bank, Reuters,
stockbroking until September 1939 found him, once again through his mother's
influence, an instant RNVR commander and personal assistant to the Director
of Naval Intelligence at the Admiralty, aged thirty-one.
At last he had a job he was good at and relished. Some of the more exotic
stories about his wartime career are not true. But he was useful and
ingenious, most strikingly in inventing and directing the "Red Indians", who
raced into occupied territory and scooped up secret enemy equipment and
documents before they could be destroyed. There is some evidence that he
would like to have seen more action than he did; he was thought to know too
much for his capture to be risked. On the whole, therefore, he had a
relatively cushy war. A brother officer asked Fleming one day about his
post-war plans, and was amazed to be told that he intended "to write the spy
story to end all spy stories". Another wartime colleague believed that the
Bond fantasies stemmed from Fleming's frustrated desire for action. An extra
spur may have been his jealousy of his elder brother Peter's reputation both
as a writer and as an intrepid adventurer.
As he became a success, his life became less interesting. Professionally, his
highly paid job with Kemsley allowed him to travel and write features for
the Sunday Times on exotic subjects, such as diamonds or casinos, but his
journalism for what was then a drab newspaper was rarely outstanding, and
the real skill and excitement fed into the Bond books. He was curiously
uninterested in serious politics. In 1929, when he spent a year at Munich
University, he failed to notice the Nazis. His sole recorded reaction to the
Suez crisis is satisfaction that the Prime Minister's recuperation at
Goldeneye Fleming's estate in Jamaica would send up its rental value.
"Accidie" was a favourite word. It became more marked. His marriage had little
hope of prospering. Fleming preferred to keep his distance from his women.
It took him a dozen years to decide to marry Ann Rothermere, and he only did
so when she was pregnant by him for the second time. They had almost nothing
in common. He found her salon of fashionable friends Cecil Beaton, Peter
Quennell, Lady Diana Cooper boring or annoying; and they tended to mock him
Evelyn Waugh called him "Thunderbird". She came to dislike Goldeneye. He
took up with someone else in Jamaica, and she became involved with Hugh
Gaitskell. Ian's life in England, she wrote to a friend, was "gin, golf
clubs, and men". Despite his athleticism and passion for golf, he was never
healthy, and towards the end of his life he was sad and sick. By then, he
had sold 30 million books and the Bond films had just begun to make serious
money (a net profit of $400m in thirteen years, Lycett believes). The
family's troubles did not end with his death. His wife was devastated and
took to drink; their son committed suicide. The estate was beset by legal
wrangles.
Lycett investigates with thoroughness the sources and models for the Bond
books, but the scale of the phenomenon would be easier to grasp if he had
set it alongside others. Does Bond outdo Poirot? How does le Carre compare?
One aspect of Fleming's career remains murky. As Kemsley's foreign news
manager, Fleming apparently used his network of foreign correspondents to
give his old wartime friends a helping hand with covert intelligence-
gathering; some of his correspondents, according to Lycett, doubled as
British agents. Fleming seems to have seen nothing wrong with using spies as
journalists, and vice versa, but one wonders whether any of his colleagues
knew what he was up to. Lycett has come across an incident as late as 1960,
when the Director of Naval Intelligence asked Fleming himself to undertake
an intelligence job during the course of a journalistic trip to the Middle
East. Was Fleming really running in Lycett's phrase "an adjunct to the
secret services"? Or was he merely passing on the odd item to his wartime
contacts under the Old Pals Act, to bolster his daydreams about himself as
Bond?
