The Man with the Golden Typewriter (28 page)

I have in mind a story with motor racing as its background, but it isn't quite along the lines you helpfully suggest. I will try and get around to it in due course and shall not be surprised if I then receive a sheaf of acid complaints from experts such as yourself.
⁸

Again with many thanks for cheering up my morning at the office.

TO WREN HOWARD

The architect Erno Goldfinger, whose modernist structures were making their mark on London's skyline, was unhappy that Fleming had used his name. Fleming did not know him personally, but his record working for the
Daily Worker
and the British Communist Party ensured a vigorous response.

Goldeneye, Oracabessa, Jamaica, B.W.I.

Tuesday [undated]

Dear Bob,

Many thanks for your letter and first of all may I send warm congratulations to you all and particularly Michael [Howard] for the splendid production of
Goldfinger
which has just reached me? Michael has done wonderfully by all my books but this is by far his best and the cover is a
stroke of genius. By the same token please pay ten guineas from my account as a present to the individual who bowled out the Canasta mistake. This would have cost me dear and I am most grateful to whoever it was. Please tell him so.

Okay for Foyles and many thank for the success.

Don't stand any nonsense from this Golden-Finger. There may be few in the UK telephone directory but get your sec to ring up the US information people at the embassy and count the number in the New York directory. Ditto the German embassy with their telephone books. And sue his solicitors for the price of the copy you sent him. Tell him that if there's any more nonsense I'll put an erratum slip and change the name throughout to GOLDPRICK and give the reason why.

Hope you do well with the book and I'll be back around the tenth to lend a hand. I have sent William a note about progress on my next.

Regards to Jonathan and all.

The exact nature of Goldfinger's complaint remains uncertain, but Michael Howard thought it worthy of serious consideration, given that the
Daily Express
was about to serialise the book. As he replied on 13 March, ‘I hated like mad giving way to Mr Goldfinger but in your absence and time being so short I was disinclined to take the responsibility of standing firm and perhaps having trouble with the serialisation. If anything had been done to cause the
Express
to delay publication they might easily have cancelled the deal which would have cost you too much money. We had discovered quite a bit about the gentleman in question. None of it was very pleasant and all of it made us unusually wary.' Goldfinger was placated with an apology and six free copies of the offending tome.

 

10

For Your Eyes Only

When Fleming flew to Jamaica in 1959 he had already made a head start on his forthcoming portfolio of short stories. Among the host of peculiarities that had caught his mind during his trip to the Seychelles the previous year was the stingray – or more specifically its tail. Possession of these fearsome items was strictly regulated: citizens were forbidden to own a specimen more than three feet long, it had to be bound at each end and could only be used as a walking stick. As Fleming pointed out, in the wrong hands they could be vicious weapons: ‘A single lash with the five foot tail can maim for life.'

Fleming used it to dramatic effect in ‘The Hildebrand Rarity', which he wrote shortly after his return to Britain in 1958. Here, Bond is on leave in the Seychelles when he encounters an American millionaire, Milton Krest, cruising the islands in search of rare specimens for his tax-dodge charity, the Krest Foundation. The object of his attentions when Bond meets him is a pink-striped fish – the Hildebrand Rarity – to acquire which he is happy to poison great stretches of ocean. A brash, brutal man, he has a trophy wife named Liz whom he likes to keep in order with the aid of ‘the Corrector,' a three-foot stingray tail (unbound) that hangs on the bedroom wall. When one day he is found dead with the Rarity thrust down his throat it is clear that his wife was the culprit but the incident is hushed up as an accident.

The expat community of the Seychelles also provided a source of inspiration. ‘There are innumerable wafer-thin “Colonels” living on five hundred a year [who] are uninteresting people, the flotsam and jetsam
of our receding Empire,' Fleming wrote, ‘who put nothing, not even a touch of the authentic beach-comber back into the haven they have chosen to whine out their lives in.' He gave a milder but no less scathing portrait of the claustrophobic nature of colonial life in ‘Quantum of Solace', a cautionary tale in the Somerset Maugham style
¹
that describes the fate of a glamorous air stewardess who marries a shy diplomat stationed in Bermuda, only to find after she embarks on an adulterous affair that her seemingly unworldly spouse has a fine line in revenge. The quantum of solace to which the title refers is the measure of love that allows a marriage to survive; when it reaches zero there is no hope. Perhaps this was a reflection on the state of Fleming's own relationship, but more likely it showed his increasing despondency with Bond and life in general. Having listened to the tale, as recounted by the Governor of the Bahamas, Bond leaves for his next task – a meeting with the FBI and US coastguards – in anticipation of an event ‘edged with boredom and futility'.

Like ‘The Hildebrand Rarity', ‘Quantum of Solace' had also been written the previous year, so with these two stories in his pocket he only had to come up with a few more. But even then little ingenuity was required: he simply plundered some of the ideas he had submitted to CBS for a potential television series. Not that they were any the worse for that. They included ‘From A View To A Kill,' concerning a Soviet assassin, based in a forest outside Paris, who targets motorcycle couriers working for SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe); ‘Risico', a drug-running tale set in Italy, with a spectacular chase around Venice's Lido that involves one of Bond's pursuers stepping on an unexploded mine; and ‘Man's Work', the story of a female archer who seeks to assassinate an ex-Nazi who has killed her parents for the sake of their Caribbean estate. It did not matter that they were old material. Each of them was vivid, heartfelt, well researched – for ‘Man's Work' Fleming consulted his weapons expert Geoffrey Boothroyd about bows and arrows
²
 – and above all they had his natural feel for place and atmosphere.

Yet Fleming wasn't sure about them. In a letter to Ann he said that at least one of the stories wasn't worth publishing. Later, the polite yet perspicacious William Plomer also had some thoughts about the direction Fleming was taking. Of one line in ‘Man's Work' he commented: ‘These “random thoughts” are diverting. Something new. One never supposed that Bond's thoughts were ever “random”. It makes him almost human.' And there were, as so often, doubts about the title. Fleming's first suggestion was
The Rough with the Smooth
, which eventually transmuted into
For Your Eyes Only
, from one of the stories that itself had started life as ‘Man's Work'.

When Fleming returned from Goldeneye that spring he was faced with a variety of tasks. The first was to write an account of his friendship with Raymond Chandler, who had died earlier in the year. After several rejections it was eventually published by
London Magazine
in April 1959. The second priority was to reorganise his position with the
Sunday Times
. Lord Kemsley had sold the paper to Roy Thomson in June the previous year, thus terminating Fleming's advantageous arrangement. Thanks to his numerous contacts, among them the editor C. D. Hamilton, he was paid a fee of £1,000 for a set number of articles per annum, and even retained a seat on the editorial board. Less comfortable was his situation with
The Book Collector
. Ever since he had assumed outright ownership in 1955 there had been squabbles between himself and Robert Harling, the modernisers, and John Hayward and John Carter, the traditionalists, with Percy Muir hovering uncertainly in the middle. As was becoming clear, a compromise between the two sides was unlikely, and their correspondence was full of petty misunderstandings accompanied by petulant threats to resign.

These, though, were run-of-the-mill matters compared to a sudden wave of interest in Bond's screen potential. An American producer, Maurice Winnick, who had links to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, contacted Fleming on his return from Goldeneye with a view to adapting 007 for television. Then there was Fleming's old friend Ivar Bryce who, in a casual, millionaire-ish manner, had decided to become a film producer. By chance he struck lucky with his first offering
The Boy and the Bridge
, directed by
Kevin McClory, which came out in July. With a view to expanding his career he proposed to found a film studio, Xanadu, and wrote Fleming a personal cheque for $50,000 worth of shares in the company in return for rights to a Bond story. His attorney, Ernie Cuneo, visited London in April – ‘charging round like a bull in a china shop knocking down the Wardour Street and Elstree inmates like ninepins', Fleming wrote fondly to William Stephenson – and later dashed off a draft plot.

None of the approaches were solid. Winnick's television schemes fell away, as did Bryce's plan for a Xanadu studio – Fleming never cashed the cheque, knowing Bryce's undependable ways – but a deal with McClory remained on the cards, and hope alone was enough to raise his spirits. So much so that in October he wrote an article for
The Spectator
headed immodestly ‘If I were Prime Minister'.

Fleming's prescription for Britain – ‘I am a totally non-political animal' – was a hefty dose of whimsy into which had been stirred a surprising amount of good sense. He recommended that the Isle of Wight be turned into a vast pleasuredrome of casinos and
maisons de tolérance
. He would pass laws to ‘stop people being ashamed of themselves', would abolish overtime, appoint a Minister of Leisure to ensure the population enjoyed itself, and would reform men's clothing, ‘which I regard as out-of-date, unhygienic and rather ridiculous'. He would also introduce a minimum wage, abolish expense accounts ‘and other forms of financial chicanery', promote the crafts and apprenticeships, reform the Press, encourage a constant flow of emigration within the Commonwealth and replace petrol cars with electric ones. His government's banner publication would be a quarterly called
Hazard
that provided unvarnished statistics on the dangers of processed food, alcohol, tobacco and shoddy car manufacture, as well as providing the correct odds for football pools and Premium Bonds. This, he said, would allow him to face with a clear conscience the fact that, ‘from the Exchequer's point of view, the most valuable citizen is the man who drinks or smokes himself to death'.

All of these, he admitted, were small things. The big things were time-wasting, ‘too vast and confused for one man's brain'. Atomic weapons, for example, were just one of the matters he would leave to be decided by his Ministers and ‘the wave of common sense which, it seems
to me, by a process of osmosis between peoples rather than politicians, is taking rapid and healthy control of the world'.

Nuclear warfare, of course, was one of the great fears that underpinned British life during the Cold War. Nevertheless, Fleming was disingenuous in his claim that atomic weapons were too big for the consideration of just one man. He was considering them quite thoroughly for his next book,
Thunderball
.

TO JOHN HAYWARD, ESQ., C.B.E., 19 Carlyle Mansions, London, S.W.3.

As part of his ongoing wrangle over
The Book Collector
Fleming raised a point about payment of a bill.

17th December, 1958

I was rather surprised at your suggestion this morning that I should pay out of my own pocket £42 for the auditors' fee for The Book Collector and, on thinking it over, I am really not quite clear what your argument is. The company paid its own auditors' fee last year – £63. Why should there now be a change?

You say that the company is running at a loss and that I should do something to reduce this loss on the grounds that you and Percy both give services to the company without remuneration.

Let us be clear about this. There is no reason why you and Percy should give services to The Book Collector without remuneration. We have some £2,000 in the bank and there is no reason why you and Percy should not be paid appropriate fees like any other contributors.

As to the periodical running at a loss, the object of our decision last week to increase our advertising rates was to correct this situation.

My contribution to The Book Collector was to save it from extinction and pay the costs of its foundation as a company and I have never pretended to be of more use to the company than as an occasional host.

You say that Percy also agrees that I should pay the auditors' fee. If that is so, which I have yet to hear from him, I shall at once reconsider
my position vis-à-vis The Book Collector and arrange by one means or another to sever any connection with it.

But these are strong words and I hope you will agree that the periodical can continue on its way in its previous cheerful, if rather happy-go-lucky, fashion.

To which Hayward replied, ‘You say that you were “rather surprised” – you bet I was rather surprised too! I innocently supposed that you would jump at the opportunity of lending a hand.' He also pointed out that contributors were never paid, except when they were in the direst of financial positions. And so it all went on.

FROM WILLIAM PLOMER

12th April, 1959

Dear I,

I've greatly enjoyed The Hildebrand Rarity. “Whacko!”
³
seems the best comment. I found Liz a little underdone at first, but she certainly redeemed herself in the end. A few stray comments: [. . .]