Like most people, I first encountered Fleming through his famous creation. I remember, aged eleven or twelve, reading From Russia with Love with a real illicit thrill. The book was passed around my pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography. So this was what the adult world was like, we remarked to each other, utterly captivated by the now familiar blend of snobbery, sex, ludicrous violence, exotic travel and superior consumer goods.
The scales fall from your eyes pretty quickly but the allure of Bond and Bondiana is potent while it lasts. Bond’s world was Fleming’s fantasy: a comic strip version of a life he almost lived. But when, after his death, Fleming the man began to crop up in the memoirs and biographies of his contemporaries I found my attention began to focus more on the author himself than his works. As a case study he provided rich material. To such an extent, in fact, that I have now inserted him as a minor character in my latest novel.
It’s hard to say what fascinates and intrigues about Ian Fleming. My own hunch is that it has something to do with his torments, his personal demons. At first glance he appears to be the man who has everything but who, in some way, is simultaneously fundamentally unhappy. The Fleming I write about is the Fleming of the late thirties and the war years, when the useless stockbroker turned into the avid spymaster. Notwithstanding his business ineptitude, Fleming, thanks to his inherited wealth, was able to live in some style before the war: with his specially decorated apartment, his red sportscar, his regular orders of 1,000 custom-made mono-grammed Morland cigarettes (he was a dogged sixty-a-day man). When he joined the Naval Intelligence Division in 1939 he became the assistant to its chief, Admiral John Godfrey. He was awarded an honorary rank in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and had a uniform made by his tailor. Yet when he was teased by his raffish friends about being a “chocolate sailor” he took real offence and sulked. It’s a telling anecdote, and it testifies to his insecurities, his vanity and childishness. His behaviour displays the very opposite of Bondian cool self-esteem.
And the more one reads about Fleming, as he appears in the two biographies thus far written, in his wife’s published letters and in the comments and observations made by his friends and associates, the more complex and flawed he appears. He seems to be one of those emotionally closed Englishmen, incapable of fully engaging with the women he took up with. Time and again his girlfriends complain of being used and then discarded. His seduction technique rarely varied. First the girlfriend would be invited to peruse his collection of erotica (heavy on flagellation), then a Viennese waltz would be played on the gramophone while dinner was served — kedgeree or sausages with copious alcohol — then to bed. The common complaint was that Fleming was clearly far more interested in himself than his companion.
Fleming described himself thus: “I’ve always had one foot not wanting to leave the cradle, and the other in a hurry to get to the grave. It makes rather painful splits of one’s life.” And, one might add, provides a field day for the amateur psychologist. Am I wrong in thinking that this curious blend of the infantile and the world-weary is most commonly found in a certain type of upper class Englishman? One can mention any number of soldiers and explorers, industrialists, aristocrats and politicians who all too easily fit this peculiar bill. James Bond now seems a kind of hopelessly remote role model, a Platonic dream — the juvenile defects replaced by expensive hobbies, the emotional failings by carnal ruthlessness: the ultimate form of wishful thinking.
The “hurry to get to the grave” recalls Waugh again, another man eager to meet his maker. What was it about Fleming’s gilded life that prompted this death wish? My own supposition, for what it’s worth, is that it is fostered by a sense of the bogus and the sham. “To thine own self be true” is not a bad aphorism to guide you through your life but neither Fleming nor Waugh adhered to it, creating elaborate personas to shore up the bundle of neuroses and fraught contradictions that made up their innate selves. Their taedium vitae is just that: the urge to quit this world being a sign of the huge fatigue that maintaining the pretence engenders.
So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of his life, Fleming so cavalierly disregarded his doctors’ orders: he knew he hadn’t long to go — his heart was failing, there were blood clots forming on his lungs — his clock was rapidly ticking down, so why not carry on eating and drinking and smoking as if he were a young man again? And this knowledge perhaps explains the new serenity that his writer friends observed in his last months, whether watching cricket with Alan Ross at Brighton or reminiscing with Cyril Connolly about pre-war dalliances in Kitzbühel. Connolly found him altogether “sadder, gentler, and wiser.” According to his wife, however, “he stared from his bedroom window at the sea in total misery.” Relief and release came on 11 August 1964. He was fifty-six.
2002
The Duchess of Windsor
17 August 1940. Does this date mark the lowest level in the fortunes of Wallis, Duchess of Windsor? On 17 August 1940, a day of humid, relentless heat, the Canadian cargo ship MV Lady Somers docked at Nassau harbour, in the Bahamas. On board was the colony’s new governor, accompanied by his wife: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. At the end of the gangway the Duke paused, allowing the Duchess to pass by, ensuring that she set foot on Bahamian soil before he did: neither of them had any idea that this tiny colony was to be their home for the next five years. They were being sent into a form of exile — one might even say a form of penal servitude — for Nassau, in those days, was a shabby colonial town with one main street, Bay Street, and a shifting population of around 20,000—made up of tax exiles, American tourists and, of course, the indigenous Bahamians. Government House was dilapidated and the swimming pool was empty. For the Duke and Duchess, after the life they had been used to living, it was an unequivocal tropical hell (albeit one peopled with servants). They were far away, constrained (they had to ask Churchill’s permission to leave the island) and gainfully employed. If you interpret the Duke’s posting as an act of revenge by the Royal Family it was a particularly shrewd and malicious one. Since the abdication and their marriage in 1937 the Duke and Duchess had led an idle, wealthy life in Paris and the Côte d’Azur (with a certain amount of foreign travel thrown in). But now war had broken out in Europe they had to go somewhere, and whoever thought of the Bahamas ensured that the biggest of bigwigs now found themselves in the smallest of small towns: the Duke and Duchess must have looked around them in dismay and incredulity.
For once, I feel I can say “must have” with some justification. Because, bizarre and presumptuous claim though it may seem, I feel I know the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in a peculiarly intimate way. This is because I placed them in my latest novel, Any Human Heart, as significant characters with whom the hero has, for some weeks, a close and fraught relationship. I undertook the usual research into their lives, spending months reading about them, poring over photographs and memoirs and generally trying to get inside their heads. But in a case like this the novelist’s task is different from the historian’s or the biographer’s. Having never encountered the Duke and Duchess, I had to imagine them into life, as I would do with the fictional characters I usually create. The better and more fully you can imagine a character the more they will live on the page — so I set about imagining the personalities of the Duke and Duchess buttressed by all the documentary evidence I could muster. Paradoxically, in the strange process that is the creation of a fiction, authenticity and plausibility are among your most powerful assets. So I had to imagine, for example, what it would be like to sit beside the Duchess of Windsor at a private supper party in Government House in Nassau in 1943. I had to imagine how it would be to play a round of golf with the Duke of Windsor in Portugal in 1940. And in the course of this exercise the couple began to flesh themselves out and become real — to such an extent that I was able to create fictitious conversations and encounters that seemed to me to have the ring of authenticity. The Duke and Duchess became as familiar to me as the other fictional characters in my novel and that strange familiarity now colours everything I read about them.