The visual image of Fleming that the wider world would come to have was the one created by the photographs on the flyleaves and back covers of his Bond books. By the time of the appearance of the first of them, he was well past forty. That he would not live to see sixty indicates the life of excess that was made evident in these pictures by his puffy jawline and drooping eyelids. There was a slight air of the ridiculous – even a campness – about the accoutrements with which he usually posed: a bow tie and a cigarette holder. Yet Fleming as a young man was handsome. His oval face was peculiar, but at the same time striking and sensuous. It’s little surprise that he was a ladies’ man.
In 1952, though, he settled down, marrying Ann Charteris. Their relationship long preceded their nuptials. Charteris had been Fleming’s lover during her marriages to both the 3rd Baron O’Neill and 2nd Viscount Rothermere. She had given birth to Fleming’s stillborn daughter during the latter marriage, and it was over her adultery that Rothermere divorced her in 1951. Fleming married her more out of duty than love: she was already pregnant by him again when they wed. Sometimes the viciousness of their relationship was played out on the safe ground of sadomasochistic sex. Other times it was enacted mentally and left deep scars.
This added to Fleming’s pre-existing mental scars, numerous and multi-origined. His melancholy and fatalism was deep-seated. Raymond Benson investigated Fleming’s past and, by extension, psyche when writing The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984). He recalls, ‘Ivar Bryce was his absolutely closest friend – they shared everything – and Ernest Cuneo was his closest American friend. They both would say that Fleming was always just unsatisfied. That he felt like there was something he needed to accomplish that was eluding him.’ Acquaintance Barbara Muir once remarked that ‘Ian always was a death-wish Charlie.’ This suggests far deeper roots for dissatisfaction than living with someone about whom he was ambivalent – namely that during his formative years Fleming felt neither valued nor wanted.
When it is suggested to him that Ian Fleming was a very convoluted person, John Pearson says, ‘You can say that again. He had his demons, as they say … Ian was a classic case of a problematic second son in the shadow of a very, very successful older brother, who was Peter Fleming. Now almost entirely forgotten, very unjustly, but he was a very good prewar travel writer. He was a man of action, very glamorous fellow, highly successful and adored by his racy old mother, Mrs Val Fleming, whereas Ian was always the odd one out and the reprobate and all the rest of it.’
Mrs Val Fleming forced Ian to break off an engagement when he was at university in Geneva, implicitly holding over him the power of disinheritance provided by her late husband’s will. Her hard-heartedness did not stop there. Although Fleming had not excelled academically and had brought a minor level of shame on the family, with his literary creation he outflanked his brother Peter to become by far the most successful of Val Fleming’s brood, yet she would not seem to have been placated by this. Asked if his mother began to respect Ian as he became one of the world’s most successful authors, Pearson says, ‘Don’t think so. I think she became more reconciled to him, but I don’t think that success really impinged upon Mrs Fleming.’
Also unimpressed by Bond was his supposed nearest and dearest. Ann looked down on James Bond novels, jokily dismissing them as ‘pornography’. ‘Annie had this desire to be a bluestocking saloniste,’ says Pearson. ‘She was an intellectual snob and she had a lot of smart followers around her, some of whom were lovers – Hugh Gaitskell was one. A whole group of rather smart intellectuals, writers and so forth, and I think Annie always thought that Ian couldn’t possibly come up to that sort of standard.’
‘That hurt him the most of anything,’ says Benson of Fleming’s wife’s failure to take seriously his literary achievements. ‘One evening he came home and she and some of her literary friends were in the living room and they were reading from his latest Bond novel aloud and laughing.’
In both public and in private correspondence, Fleming would come out with self-deprecating remarks about his work: ‘I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes’; ‘My books tremble on the brink of corn’; Bond was a ‘cardboard booby’. Yet this strikes one as being not so much a genuinely held feeling but an example of getting his retaliation in first, the position automatically lunged for by someone in a lifelong cringe at the expectation of reproach.
Both Fleming’s American agent Naomi Burton and his friend and fellow writer Noël Coward felt he had it in him to write a non-thriller, i.e. literary fiction. From Burton’s point of view, the only reason Fleming did not was that he was afraid of being ridiculed by his wife and her friends.
No fewer than three characters in Fleming’s fiction are afflicted by ‘accidie’, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘Spiritual or mental sloth; apathy’. It seems reasonable to conclude that in fact Fleming had this malaise, and that the malaise was the consequence of a deflated spirit engendered by a lifelong lack of validation.
Pearson recalls of Fleming, ‘He really gave very little of himself away. Although when I worked for him I had three children, including two sons, I don’t think I ever discussed the fact that he had a son too. There was never any interplay of family relations or anything very much.’ Although Pearson suggests this circumspection is partly attributable to his old profession (‘I always felt that he had absorbed an awful lot of spymaster’s mentality from his time in Room 39’), the fact that Fleming did not readily proffer the information of the existence of Caspar – born in 1952 – seems yet another measure of his lack of conviction that anything about him might be of interest to anyone else.
Yet his spiritual flatness was by no means perpetual. Cubby Broccoli, co-producer of the Bond movies, recalled Fleming as a man curious about everything, always anxious to glean knowledge about people and their lives. This hardly chimes with the notion of a man weary of existence, notwithstanding the natural inquisitiveness of writers. Benson offers, ‘He was very melancholic by nature, although he had a very dry wit and a dark humour about him. When he was out and about with his buddies, he was a barrel of laughs and a lot of fun.’
Nor did Fleming exhibit the unpleasantness that is the usual giveaway of self-loathing. ‘Oh, no, not at all,’ says Pearson. ‘I never saw any sign of it whatsoever.’ Politesse comes naturally to the upper classes but Fleming’s civility was not a thin veneer. Pearson: ‘He was in fact very, very kind to me. He got me my first commission to write a book. That was very much typical of Ian.’ Someone who was on far more intimate terms with Fleming was his stepdaughter Fionn Morgan (née O’Neill), daughter of Ann and her first husband Shane. Aged sixteen when her mother married Fleming, she has described him as ‘as much a father to me as a stepfather’ and bristles at criticism of him.
James Bond, though, ultimately seems to be born of Fleming’s unhappiness. He said he wrote the first Bond book to ‘take my mind off the shock of getting married at the age of forty-three’. Although the point he was making was about the upending of what had seemed the natural course of his life – bachelorhood – it’s still a peculiar thing indeed to say about what is usually a cause of great joy and anticipation.
For Pearson, James Bond stemmed from his creator’s fantasy of a happier life. ‘It was very much an essay in the autobiography of dreams,’ he says. ‘I think he used the books, or used Bond, as an alter ego to enjoy himself in ways that he couldn’t in reality.’
