OPINION:
I’ve been an Ian Fleming aficionado since my teens, so I was pleased to read “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,” the new biography by Nicholas Shakespeare.
I contacted Mr. Shakespeare and asked him why he wrote the biography.
“When I was approached to write a new authorized biography of Ian Fleming, the first since 1966, my initial reaction was hesitation,” Mr. Shakespeare replied. “Could I face spending so long in the company of a melancholic cad and creator of the cold killing machine, James Bond? This incomplete image was my only image of Fleming.
“Before rejecting the proposal, I did some background research, and I found to my surprise that Fleming, the sardonic bounder, was kinder than I’d hitherto imagined. Again and again, the many women he’d had affairs with looked back on him with fondness, describing his kindliness as his chief characteristic. This was not a quality I’d associated with James Bond.
“There is much more to Fleming than Bond, a character he created almost as an afterthought in the last twelve years of his life, when the most interesting part of it was essentially over.
“To simplify horribly, there would be no James Bond had Fleming not led the life he did, but if Bond had not existed, Fleming is someone we should still want to know about.”
How would you describe Ian Fleming?
“Ian Fleming was a misunderstood and melancholic puritan, damaged by a controlling mother and forced into being a blacker sheep than he naturally was by the all-round dominance of his brilliant elder brother Peter. But this disguised a kind and loyal figure who crammed much more into his life than most of us.
“James Bond is a fantasy version of Fleming, the intelligence officer that he might have become during the Cold War. His fictional agent, a modern buccaneer, would do battle with a fresh enemy, Soviet Russia. Ian would execute in modern form those plans which he had conceived against the Nazis. In wartime, Ian had put these ideas into life; in uneasy peace, he would put them into fiction.”
What were Ian Fleming’s major contributions to the war effort?
“He helped set up the Propaganda unit, the Topographical unit, the intelligence-gathering commando unit, 30AU, which captured the entire German naval archives in May 1945, as well as several Enigma machines, shortening the war, some historians argue, by as much as 18 months.
“His many jealous critics had inferred that in WW2 he was merely in charge of in-trays, out-trays and ashtrays at the Admiralty, where he served as the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey.
“In fact, Ian Fleming was in the inner citadel of British Intelligence, one of only 30 people cleared to know the top wartime secrets of Bletchley Park, and one of only a handful of trusted insiders who helped set up America’s first foreign intelligence organization with Colonel William Donovan in 1941.”
How big a part of his James Bond thrillers came from his service in naval intelligence?
“Almost all! A perception of his novels that he did much to popularize is that they were a series of sensational fantasies based on ’the most hopeless sounding plots.’
“This was not the case. They were grounded in reality and a truth that he could not reveal but had intensely experienced. By converting his lived experience into fiction, and updating it, he released the burden of that knowledge.
“Asked to calculate the percentage of himself in the Bond books, Fleming gave this estimation. ’I can say ninety per cent personal experience really.’ He took the cards he had been dealt and slipped them to Bond, then re-arranged them to play a winning hand.”
Do you see his life as a tragedy, considering that he didn’t live to enjoy the wealth and worldwide popularity from his Bond books?
“Selby Armitage, who had known Ian all his life, met him not long before he died. ’Ian, what’s it like, what’s it really like to be famous? It’s a thing you always wanted when you were young. Are you enjoying it now you’ve got it?’ He looked very sorry for himself. ’It was all right for a bit. … But now, my God. Ashes, old boy. Just ashes. … I’d swap the whole damned thing for a healthy heart.’”
Is Ian Fleming still read today due to the popular film series?
“An easy answer would be that the films were exceptionally popular and have kept Bond going since Fleming death aged 56 in 1964. Yet could it be that they were only so popular because the character Fleming created was so unique and captivating, at once a hero of modernization and yet a symbol of retrospective power?”
• Paul Davis’ On Crime column covers true crime, crime fiction and thrillers.
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Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
Nicholas Shakespeare
Harper, 864 pages, $36
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