Part II: Honor and self-constraint can stave off tyranny.
Shaken, Not Stirred
“He is better known than God.”
You learn things from studying any life, but more from some lives than others. For some reason my father always had the autobiography of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini around when I was growing up. Frequently, of an evening, he took Plutarch’s Lives down off the shelf.
When a new biography of Ian Fleming came out recently, John Kienker—esteemed Managing Editor of the Claremont Review of Books—thoughtfully called it to my attention. In his managerial and editorial wisdom, he knew it was more up my alley than, say, the Life of Saint Teresa of Avila—beautiful and salvific as it may have been. Like most sentient beings of my generation, I was familiar with James Bond mostly through the 20-odd Bond films of the past 60 years. I thought it would be a pleasant amusement to learn a bit more about the author of the James Bond novels behind the movies. So I volunteered to write a review.
Working up the review, I learned a lot about Ian Fleming and the Bond-iverse. But it is always the case when writing such a review that you learn much that doesn’t—however piquant or worthy of note—make the final cut.
I was reviewing Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man (2024), which is quite good. But for young generations only thinly aware of James Bond, Andrew Lycett in his Ian Fleming (2013) nicely summarizes how the hero appears full blown in the first chapter of Fleming’s first Bond book, Casino Royale:
Within the first few pages Ian had introduced most of Bond’s idiosyncrasies and trademarks. Agent 007 looks like Hoagy Carmichael, with something cold and ruthless in his eyes. He drives a 1933 4½-litre Bentley, one of the last with the supercharger developed by Ian’s friend Amherst Villiers. He drinks champagne and dry Martinis, shaken, not stirred: “three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.” He carries his Morland cigarettes (a special Balkan and Turkish blend with their triple gold band) in a flat, light gun-metal box. Underneath his dinner-jacket he sports a flat .25 Beretta automatic. And on his arm is the enticing Vesper Lynd, his dark, blue-eyed assistant seconded from the Deuxième Bureau, wearing a black velvet dress—“simple and yet with the touch of splendour that only half a dozen couturiers in the world could achieve”—a thin necklace of diamonds at her throat, and “a diamond clip in the low vee which just exposed the jutting swell of her breasts.”
Lycett doesn’t mention that the vodka will preferably be made with grain rather than potatoes. Bond, in Casino Royale, names the drink “Vesper” after the enticing Vesper Lynd, the beautiful personal assistant from Section S, who was sent to support Bond in Casino Royale and who has a name redolent of evenfall. Only after falling in love with her, and she with him, does he discover she is a double agent. Some drink…. The one you have, as Bond says, when you are having only one before dinner.
But there is another layer to the Vesper story. As Lycett tells it: The name came from “an incident Ian had experienced with [his good friend Ivar Bryce] on Jamaica’s north coast.”
One afternoon they had visited a large, isolated mansion tucked away at the end of a long drive. They were surprised to be met by an old butler who informed them, “The Colonel will be delighted to receive you.” They were ushered into a dimly lit drawing-room where an old grey-haired gentleman sat. After chatting amiably for a while, they were interrupted by the butler carrying a tray with three glasses. “Vespers are served,” he announced stiffly. This turned out to be a mixture of iced rum, fruit and herbs which the Colonel habitually drank at six o’clock every evening.
Fleming and Bryce were charmed by the experience and developed their own gin-based concoction (the one that appears in Casino Royale) and called it Vesper. So a real drink served charmingly in real life became the inspiration for the name of a fictional beauty, after whom was named a memorable fictional drink that was actually a real one. Vespers seem somehow better even than Happy Hour.
Fleming went to Eton, hated it, was forced to leave early, and yet remained a faithful Etonian the rest of his life. Like his fellow Etonians he wore a veneer of effortless assurance and savoir vivre into every situation. James Bond came by the trait naturally. When Fleming’s son Caspar went to Eton in 1965, Bond mania was in a frenzy. But all the Bond books had been banned at Eton for obscenity.
Early in World War II, while working in the office of the Director of Naval Intelligence, Fleming spent some time in “the office of the bomb and dirty-tricks expert, Lord Suffolk, nephew of Lord Curzon through his mother, the American heiress, Daisy Leiter,” who “taught Ian how to kill a man by biting him in the back of the neck” (Lycett again). Running across this kind of thing is bound to stir the curiosity of any young man of spirit.
Shakespeare’s favorite Bond book is From Russia, With Love, which was also Fleming’s favorite. He quotes American publisher Al Hart’s wonderful reaction when the manuscript first landed on his desk: “A real wowser, a lulu, a dilly and a smasheroo.”
Fleming became a great admirer of Sir William Stephenson, most famous as the man called Intrepid. Stephenson was a man of parts. Fleming’s first authorized biographer, John Pearson, describes the parts that Fleming admired:
He was very tough—First World War fighter-pilot, MC and DFC, and European lightweight amateur boxing champion. He was very rich—first million before the age of thirty from his invention of the first successful radio photograph transmitter. He was single-minded and patriotic and a man of few words. He mixed the ‘largest dry martinis in America and served them in quart glasses’ and was ‘one of the great secret agents of the last war’.
Somehow it’s the martinis in quart glasses that stick in the memory.
The global fame of James Bond was and is phenomenal. One of the great boosts to this fame came on March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), 1961, when Life magazine listed ten favorite books of the new American president John F. Kennedy. Churchill’s Marlborough was number three. Stendhal’s The Red and the Black came in tenth. Fleming’s From Russia, with Love was number nine on the list. American and world sales of Bond novels shot up like a rocketing pheasant.
Shakespeare recounts what Fleming’s well-travelled niece Gilly said to him about Bond: “He is better known than God…. All the Tibetans know of James Bond. They’ve never heard of God.” The Italian film director Adolfo Celi was welcomed with feasts in villages in deepest Africa “where they had never seen or read anything, but where they had seen ‘Thunderball’.” Kim Jong Il was a big Bond fan. A certain band of Ugandan rebels once marched to battle chanting together: “James Bond!” “James Bond!”
As I mention at the end of my CRB review, Fleming’s spartan retreat, where he wrote all his Bond books—he named it Goldeneye, on the north shore of Jamaica—achieved just the sort of fame he aspired for it to have. It became a very exclusive resort, still named Goldeneye, where you can rent the “Fleming Villa” for a mere $16,000 a night. One colorful detail the vigilant CRB editors cut out, but I can’t help relishing:
As Chris Blackwell, the Goldeneye proprietor (son of Ian Fleming’s “last love”) says,
the resort is a world where you can wander over the foot bridge that leads to the beachfront bistro bar and there’s Elon Musk on his own having a drink, Ryan Gosling is on the phone to his agent at the end of the other bar,…Jay-Z and Beyoncé are hidden in their villa on a romantic weekend, and in the ocean, Grace Jones is having a swim.
If you’re flying private, the best option is the Ian Fleming International Airport, just ten minutes down the road.
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On campus, today's forlorn meritocrats no longer believe what the apparatchiks are teaching them.