From: saint@cats.ucsc.edu (Daniel Ira Bodenheimer)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: James Bond
Date: 8 Oct 1992 18:48:35 GMT
Organization: University of California; Santa Cruz
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: am.ucsc.edu
Summary: A review of the James Bond Phenomenon of the sixties
Keywords: James, Bond, Fleming, Charteris, Saint, spy


james.bond.txt

The James Bond Phenomenon
By Leslie Charteris

Published in the December 1965 issue of Diplomat magazine.

For several years now, reporters in many places and different media 
have been asking me "What do you think of James Bond?"  The gleam in 
their eyes telegraphs only too clearly that they are hoping for a headline, 
which of course means something disparaging, because nothing makes 
such good copy as a feud.  And knowing that anything less than fulsome 
praise could be twisted or selectively misquoted to make me sound snide, 
petty or jealous, (the regrettable delight of a great many interviewers) I 
have always steadfastly declined to answer on the grounds that "I don't 
think an author ought to discuss his competitors."  This of course was 
strictly a weasel out.  But having been invited here more or less to write 
my own interview, I can at least be sure that anything that may be held 
against me will be something I did say.

It would be nonsense to raise the question of "bad taste" in 
connection with my temerity in discussing James Bond.  The crime-story 
reviewer of no less a paper than the New York Times, Anthony Boucher, 
is the author of a number of published mysteries.  It could be argued 
that he seems these days largely to have retired from creative production 
(to my personal regret) but I have never heard any writer complain that a 
Boucher panning was influenced by Boucher's status as an author.  In 
fact, it could logically be argued that the man best qualified to review a 
detective story is an established detective-story writer.  At any rate he 
has demonstrated that he can practice what he preaches, and has indeed 
successfully done so.  I wish I could disfranchise any dissenting nit-think 
by stating that I am really immune to "professional jealousy," that I love 
to see any writer make money with anything (there are so few who do), 
and that I feel that even in these days of television-whittled literacy there 
is still room for all of us.  In a milieu even more enthralled by star-mania 
than the world of books, that Jack Lemmon may top the latest box-office 
poll does not mean that Gregory Peck should go out and shoot himself.
Without any sickening false modesty, therefore, I must say at once 
that I am well aware that I, like Ian Fleming, am the creator of another 
successful continuing character with a world-wide following; a character 
who also became something of a household word and who inevitably 
would (and did) evoke comparisons that could hardly hope to avoid a 
taint of rivalry. I realize that I must probably be talking to the wind when 
I try to say now that I have outgrown any feeling of competitiveness in 
my profession; that the racket has been extraordinarily good to me and I 
need not begrudge anyone else anything they can get out of it; that the 
fame and fortune of Mr. Fleming never had any more impact on my life 
than those of Mr. Onassis or the Beatles, so that I can come out and 
talk like anybody else with what might be termed impartial professional 
judgment.

When I accepted the invitation of this space I probably knew less 
about James bond than practically anybody. The reason is that for many 
years I have avoided reading anything whatsoever that approaches my 
own line of country, out of a somewhat fanatical desire to avoid the risk 
of unconscious imitation. I had still never read one of the Bond books 
when the movie Dr. No came out. I went to see it, attracted more by the 
physique of Ursula Andress than by the fact that it was a James Bond 
picture. Later, believing that it would not be fair for me to hold an 
opinion of James Bond based solely on a movie version, I made a point of 
reading the first Ian Fleming novel I came across, which happened to be 
Goldfinger. When I accepted the present assignment I had to do a crash 
course of reading, which, through trying, may have had the advantage of 
concentrating my impressions in a way that could never have happened if 
I had been assimilating the books as they came out, at the calendrical 
rate of one a year. As my notes rapidly accumulated, I discovered that, as 
a perhaps tedious perfectionist about my own details, I was collecting a 
list of accusations against Fleming as a sloppy writer of English and an 
ignoramus about a number of subjects, in some of which he tried to 
present himself as an authority.

Fortunately my conscientious research also led to the discovery that 
the James Bond fad had already generated a (to me) bizarre literature of 
its own, ranging from The James Bond Dossier, by Kingsley Amis, 
himself a British novelist of some distinction, to paperbacked 007 James 
Bond, a Report, by O. F. Snelling, and For Bond Lovers Only, a 
complication of shorter magazine and newspaper effusions by various 
commentators.  Among them, they pinpricked nearly all the technical 
errors which I had red-pencilled, and made up for the others by throwing 
in another crop which I had missed.  So now I am free to say, without 
being called personally picayune, that for all his pretensions of 
thoroughness Fleming indeed spattered his books with boners which 
have been documented by other students before me.  I mean the type of 
clanger which has a sailor talk about "getting to leeward of the stink" 
when he means he wants to get away from it; not knowing the medical 
difference between a fracture and a dislocation, and saying that a Swiss 
bank would readily confirm whether a certain person had an account 
with it.  Mr. Amis had even beaten me to the dissection of a majestic 
passage which I had tucked away as a potential grenade:  "As a woman, 
he wanted to sleep with her..." (Casino Royale).

I could multiply these examples, but the job has already been down 
on a much more comprehensive scale than we have room for here, by 
experts who also profess to be admirers.  But the great and increasingly 
fascinating question, to me, is:  how and why did this Bond character, 
whose best friends seem to delight in tearing him down, achieve this 
incontrovertible eminence which he has lately enjoyed?

With an almost fevered desire to find good reasons without truckling 
to a cult, I have performed spine-cracking backbends in the effort to find 
something laudable.  And I have to confess failure.  I cannot with 
honesty rate James Bond as anything but a tiresome slob.  I will acquit 
him of responsibility for all the environmental errors with which Fleming 
has burdened him, but for his personal picture we can only refer to 
Fleming because this is the only text.  And this portrait is not one which 
I can personally admire from any angle.  Despite Fleming's own 
publicized experience in war-time Intelligence, and his plausible 
preoccupation with the minutiae of the British Secret Service (about 
which I know precious little), the agent whom he depicts would surely 
have flunked out of the OSS.  For example, this unenlightened clot goes 
to bed with a pistol under his pillow (the silliest place to keep it, I recall 
being taught).  In the broader plan, he habitually commits tactical 
blunders which can hardly be diagrammed in much less space than 
Fleming took to work them out, but which must regularly have his 
brighter audiences squirming for him.  To be sure, no matter what 
bloopers he makes, he has only the simpletons of SMERSH or SPECTRE 
or whatever to worry about.  In this he is unlike other operators in the 
field who have had to cope with jeopardy from the Law as well; operators 
such as the Four Just Men, Bulldog Drummond (with whom Amis and 
Snelling both persist quite irrelevantly in comparing Bond), or even, if I 
dare mention him, the Saint.

Is he, then, endearing?  Not, apparently, to the devoted commentators 
who have taken time out from their own work to study him with such 
profundity.  They concede that his material snobberies, the lists of 
capitalized product and purveyors which make some pages of the books 
read like thinly disguised radio commercials, may begin to grate on 
sensitive ears.  They admit, not without pride, that "he treats women 
badly," this being a modern symbol of masculinity and independence, but 
his selfishness is forgivable because he does physically belt them in the 
chops, like some of his cruder predecessors.

There is a perilous temptation to theorize from incidental data.  The 
first book of what was to become a sequence of hardy Bond annuals 
appeared in 1953, and lit no candles in the sky.  Nor did the next two, 
although their sales maintained a reassuring growth.  It was in 1957 or 
'58, as best I can determine from the bibliographies, that the reprints 
began to accelerate.  Then, in 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected 
President of the United States, and amid the mass of obiter dicta 
attributed to him was the statement that his favorite author was Ian 
Fleming.  Immediately the James Bond sales charts rocketed into the 
upper margin.

This may have been sheer coincidence.  President Eisenhower, in his 
time, was reported to be an avid reader of Westerns, which did nothing 
perceptible to resuscitate the long declining sale of Westerns in reading 
(as distinct from movie or television) form.  It would be illogical to claim 
that the Kennedy seal of approval transformed a moderate success, 
overnight, into a global best-seller.

There is no doubt that the movies triggered and continued to power 
Bond's second great leap forward.  To skillful assemblages of 
Technicolored hokum, starring an excellent and personable actor, they 
added a visualization of Bond's women which is still a monument of 
inspired casting, and which undoubtedly brought the books to the 
attention of many million people who would otherwise have never opened 
one.  I feel that most of those new-found readers should have been 
disappointed when they discovered that Fleming's literary style was 
neither as suspenseful nor as sexy as the technique of the film 
photographers, yet the book sales suggest that an awe-inspiring 
percentage of them stayed on to become addicts of the original books.
How, then, can we rationally assess the global hysteria which has 
taken up this Bond cult and given him the biggest sale of any fictional 
character of our time, a popularity reaching from presidents to peasants, 
and made him a household word even in countries and cultures utterly 
alien to everything he stands for?

He is not likeable as a personality (I repeat, I am talking about the 
James Bond of the books, not Sean Connery) and even the women who 
are supposed to keel over before his virility never get fond enough in their 
most passionate moments to call him anything more familiar than 
"James."  His Epicurean veneer still leaves him a Mike Hammer in an 
Old Etonian tie.  He is not clever, he makes the most amateurish 
mistakes and falls into the oldest and most obvious traps.  Finally, he 
has no sense of humor.

I think the contrast I must make, much as I should have preferred to 
keep the Saint out of it, is that I have more than once called Simon 
Templar "a man born out of his time," whereas James Bond is 
unmistakably and rigidly a man of his time.  Ian Fleming was actually a 
year younger than I, but he did not give birth to Bond until he was 45, 
long after World War II and even after the Korean sequel.  I wrote the 
first Saint a full generation, 25 years, earlier, when I was under 21.  I 
began in an era when I could be unreservedly fired by the swashbuckling 
zest of a picture like Douglas Fairbanks' The Three Musketeers, and 
wished that I would have lived in such a colorful world or that some of 
its spirit (as interpreted by Fairbanks) could be brought back.  Fleming 
started in middle age, after he must have outgrown any daydreams of 
that kind.  He seems to have shared the disillusion and pragmatism of 
that decade.  The Saint was a deliberate attempt to create a hero in the 
antique heroic sense:  James Bond is the calculated contemporary non-
hero, just as the Beatles or non-music--and he is enjoying the same 
vogue.

Raymond Chandler, a literary landmark in his own right, has called 
Ian Fleming "the best thriller writer since Eric Ambler"; yet to me Ambler 
always seemed to preserve some of the romantic glitter which Fleming did 
his best to extirpate.  Fleming set his sights and welded them in place on 
the last page of his first book (Casino Royale) when, after spending the 
last third of the book developing the tender side of an affair between 
Bond and the girl, he has her write what to my old-fashioned 
sentimentality was a moving confession that she has always been a 
double agent, but for love of Bond she can't go on, and the only way out 
for her is the overdose of sleeping pills which she takes.  Fleming, 
irrevocably riding the nouvelle vague which he has adopted for his own, 
has James Bond speak the most brutal epitaph I have ever read, 
reporting the incident to his boss:  "The bitch is dead now."
This is to me the quintessence of Fleming's contribution to the 
literature of escape.  Instead of using his talents to try in some small 
way to stem a murky and joyless tide, he dove deep into it.  And he shut 
the escape hatch.