Did Ian Fleming like cars, girls and guns, like the spy he created?Any writer who has struggled to “do the words” would take heart from the self-effacing assessment written for himself by Ian Fleming, the raffish Englishman who turned 100 this month became one of the most successful authors of his time through the creation of the world’s best-loved spy, James Bond. Fleming died in 1964, at 56, of complications from pleurisy after playing a round of golf though he had a heavy cold. But he used to inhale 80 cigarettes a day, and loved his drink. But he had adopted a strict writing routine in his last 12 years, the period in which he wrote more than a dozen Bond novels. Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon — 2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle. He described his first Bond book, Casino Royale, as “an oafish opus,” and offered further disparagement in a 1963 BBC radio interview. “If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive”. Fleming’s workaday approach to writing is among the revelations drawing crowds of Bond lovers to ‘For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond,’ an exhibition that opened at the Imperial War Museum in London last month and runs through March 2009. It explores the relationship between Fleming and Bond and shows how the debonair author drew on his experiences as a man about town and as a prewar foreign correspondent, in the world of banking and investment, in his postwar sojourns in Jamaica, and as a World War II aide to the head of Britain’s directorate of naval intelligence, to give what he described as “verisimilitude” to Bond’s world of spies and villains and romance.Fleming said, “I extracted my plots from my wartime memories, dolled them up, attached a hero and a villain, and there was the book. Auric Goldfinger, “a misshapen short man with red hair and a bizarre face” in Fleming’s description, had the author’s “flat golf swing” and the surname of a prominent Hungarian-born British architect, Erno Goldfinger. Rosa Klebb of Smersh, “a dreadful chunk of a woman” and “a toadlike figure” to Fleming, had her likeness in Maj. Tamara Nikolayeva Ivanova, a notoriously sadistic K.G.B. agent. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, “with lips that suggest contempt, tyranny and cruelty,” got his name from a Fleming schoolmate at Eton. Odd Job, Goldfinger’s enforcer and “a uniquely dreadful person,” drew his deadly missile of a bowler hat from Fleming’s knowledge of the nefarious uses to which British intelligence services made of everyday headgear.Bond himself, Fleming said, was “a compound of all the secret agents and commandos I met during the war,” but his tastes— in blondes, martinis “shaken, not stirred,” expensively tailored suits, scrambled eggs, short-sleeved shirts and Rolex watche— ¿ were Fleming’s own. But Bond was “more handsome”, Fleming said. But the exhibition suggests otherwise. In one section it has one Mary Pakenham, saying of Fleming, “No one I know had sex so much on the brain as Ian.” -JOHN F. BURNS (NYT)
