of-the-world of his generation; he showedmore
character, a muchquicker brain, and a promise
NOTES & TOPICS
Ian Fleming Remembered
i ~tI ~qmade
r L ~ M~ N o mademyacquaintancebefore
his. It happenednear~-y forty years
ago, when he was a boy at school. "I have a
natural love of action," he wrote manyyears
later, and at Eton this was already plain: he
was an athlete of exceptional power, and was
twice Victor Ludorum.In fact before he was
sixteen he had wonevery single athletic event
except the high jump. This made news of more
than Etonian interest and caused him to be
featured in the newsreelsof those pre-television
days. But he was no small-brained muscle-boy;
all through his life his physical energy ran, or
jumped, neck and neck with intellectual
curiosity. He evidently wanted to know all
about life and a gooddeal about literature, and
especially about its impact on life. It so hap-
penedthat while Flemingwas still at school my
first novel madeits appearance; ke got hold of
it, read it, and was excited by it. Hehad almost
certainly never heard of mebefore, and I can’t
remember what put him on to the book. He
might have been guided by his sharp flair, like
that of a mine-detector, for a new threat to
dullness and complacency.Or possibly t,h,e use
by reviewers of words like "volcanic’ had
arousedhis interest. (There is evidencethat the
tremors set up by this book have continued in
Africa until now,and it is at present being re-
printed.) The thought occurs to mefor the first
time that Fleming may just conceivably have
been a little influenced by Turbott Wolfe. It
cannot be called a thriller, but manypeople
found it disturbing. They were meant to. It re-
cognised and asserted that life includes the
head-oncollision and struggle of violent forces.
I first met Flemingsomeyears later, whenI
had returned to live in London.He asked me to
a party in Chelsea given by his handsome
mother. He was youthfully handsomehimself,
wearinga well-cut dark blue suit and with very
good manners, easy, cheerful and welcoming.
After Eton he had been at Sandhurst and in
Munich, and was now in Reuters, which sent
him at various times to Berlin and Moscow.
He seemedto me to have good luck on his side
--youth, health, strength, money,general eligi-
bility, a social status taken for granted, work
that interested him, and a consciousness of his
powers. At that first encounter he struck me
as no mere conventional young English man-
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of something dashing or daring. Like a mettle-
someyounghorse, he seemedto showthe whites
of his eyes and to smell somebattle from afar.
If I bad been anything like an ambitious
young man-of-the-world myself, or if I had
been enjoying life less, I can imagine that I
might have thought how pleasant it would be
to be him. In fact such a thought could hardly
have occurred to me, because our ways of life
were quite different. Someof his keen interests
--fast cars, golf, gambling--wereas immeasur-
ably far from mine as some of mine from his.
But his liveliness and curiosity were congenial
to me, and we were responsive to each other’s
jokes, anecdotes, and opinions.
DuRmo ~H~ SSCOSDWORLDWARour paths
began to converge. Wewere in the sameservice
and for sc,me of the time under the same roof.
Myself embattled as that marginal anomaly, a
civilian officer on the Naval Staff, I was an
inconspicuous but diligent auxiliary of the
NavalIntelligence Division, in which Fleming’s
role was .~mportant. His responsibilities at the
Admiralty gave him scope for someof his best
abilities and he enjoyed exercising them. They
were mos: efficiently applied to defeating the
enemy; and Admiral Godfrey, at that time
Director of Naval Intelligence, looks back upon
him as a "war winner."
Fleming’s private self--or selves, because he
was not a manof a single interest or a single
aspect--seemed to someto be hidden, or with-
drawn. There were persons near him during
the Warwhofelt that they never really, knew
him except as an active functionary, polite and
often cheerful with those who seemed to him
properly tuned up, and capable of being abrupt
with others. I suppose his inmost self to have
been strongly fortified, and I should guess that
some who were much attracted by him, and
believed themselves attractive to him, mayhave
found to their disappointment or even sorrow
that any right of waythroughthe fortifications,
or tenancy within, was denied to them. He was
perhapstoo self-possessed a manto tolerate pos-
sessiveness aimed at him by others. In those
strenuous wartimedays he did not give, or give
so clearly, the sense he occasionally conveyed
of being alone when not alone. His wartime
associate Robert Harling has written of
Fleming’s"sad, bony, fateful face." There were
moments,as he grew older, whenwith its heavy
eyelids and mixed look of determination and
abstraction, it looked like a sculptured maskof
melancholy.
I have heard it said of him that he kept his
li~e in separate compartments.So he did, but
 Notes & Topics
surdy that is quite usual for persons with many
different activities and interests, whotouch
hfe at various levels that do not overlap and
may have nothing in commonwith one another.
Onceduring the War, whensome of its worst
phases were past, wc were feeding alone to-
gether and found time to speak of what we in-
tended to do whenit wasover. Witha diffidence
that camesurprisingly from so buoyant a man,
he said he had a wish to write a thriller. He
maynot have used exactly that word, but made
it quite plain that hc had in mind some ex-
citing story of espionage and sudden death. I
at once made it equally plain how strongly I
believed in his ability to write such a book, and
in its probableoriginality. "But," I said, "it’s
no good writing just one. With that sort of
book, you must becomeregular in your habits.
You must hit the nail again and again with
the samehammer until it’s driven into the thick
head of your potential public." He gave mca
long and thoughtful look.
It was not until hc was at his Jamaicanhouse
at the beginning of ~95~ that hc sat downto
write Casino Royale. I knewnothing about it.
"When I got back to London," hc wrote
someyears later, "I did nothing with the manu-
script. I was too ashamedof it. No publisher
wouldwant it, and, if one did, I wouldnot have
the face to see it in print." He went on to ex-
plain how one day he had been lunching with
me, and had asked me "how you got cigarette
smokeout of a womanonce you’ve got it in."
Always,I hope, alert to the caprices of the
humanrace, and generally expectant that they
are likely to be grotesque, I must have specu-
lated rapidly about this intimate-sounding in-
jection. He went on to explain that one couldn’t
use a wordlike "exhales," and "puffs it out,"
he thought, sounded silly. Andthen--"William
looked at me sharply: ’You’vewritten a book.’"
Of course I asked to see it. He felt that I
would"tell the horrible truth about the book
without condemningme or being scornful."
I read, I applauded, he conquered.
Tn~. BESTAND MOST entertaining analysis of his
thrillers ever likely to be written is to be found
in Kingsley Amis’ forthcoming book. Myown
summary view of themis that they are brilliant,
romantic fairy-tales in which a dragon-slaying
maiden-rescuing hero wins battle after battle
against devilish forces of destruction, and yet is
indestructible himself: an ancient kind of myth
skilfully re-created in a modern idiom. They
are, like life, sexy and violent, but I have never
thought them corrupting. Comparedwith some
of the nasty stuff that gets into print, they have
a sort of boyish innocence.
In the popular imagination Fleming is con-
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65
fused with or thought to have been identical
with James Bond. There may be, something
Flemingish about Bond, but I didn t see much
of Bondin Fleming, whowas more perturbable.
Let us admit, as Fleminghimself did, that Bond
and his adventures are something of an adoles-
cent fantasy. Is there anything wrongin that?
Not at the box office. At the time of his death
some2o million copies of his books had been
sold and they had been translated by then
into eighteen languages. The films have already
captured vast audiences.
Fleming’s attitude to his ownbooks was per-
fectly straightforward. He was pleased that they
did so well (who, in his place, wouldn’t have
been?), took a proper pride in his skill in com-
posing them, and was delighted that they
pleased readers worth pleasing--President Ken-
nedy, for instance. But there was never any sign
that he pretended to himself or to anybodyelse
that the literary value of what he wrote was
underestimated. It did please him to pretend
that I was a sort of only begetter of his books,
which was nonsense. Or was it just an indica-
tion of his characteristic capacity for gratitude?
As somebody who knew him well reminded me
lately, "Ian alwayssaid thank you." Someof the
inscriptions in the copies of his books he gave
me repeated the unearned but recurrent compli-
ment-for example, in mycopy of Goldfinger,
"To William, whostarted these balls rolling."
In fact I used to be the first person to whom
his books were shown, partly for professional
reasons. WhenI found things to praise, he
seemedpleased; when I suggested emendations,
he was attentive--sometimes too attentive. I
once said to him, just after reading a newJames
Bondtypescript, that although the persons in it
often made exclamatory remarks, these were
never followedby a point of exclamation. I said
this half-teasingly, but he took it so seriously
that when the book came out, the kNew Yor
Times took him to task for pepperinghis pages,
like a schoolgirl, with exclamationmarks.
I thought it admirable and dignified in him
that he appeared to take no notice whatever of
the envy he naturally provoked. This envy
showeditself sometimesin spiteful or patron-
ising reviews or gossip. Ungenerousnatures,
withouta tenth of his vitality, brains, or experi-
ence, would sometimestry and mask their envy
by disapproval or by affecting a high moral
tone about his books, calling themsadistic (un-
derstandably) or "snobbish"--by which I sup-
pose they meant status-conscious or something.
To somepeople, naturally, the books could not
and cannot appeal. "Not mycup of tea," I have
heard somesay: the answer to that is that the
Bondbooksare not cups of tea at all, but some-
thing more stimulating. In any case, what on
66 Notes
earth wouldbe the character of a bookthat was
eucrybody’s cup of anything? Though to some
the books are distasteful, I have never heard
themcalled boring.
ONE COULD HARDLY CALL Fleming a bookish man,
which suggests somehow an untidy, bespectacled,
bible-backed,pedantichalf-recluse. But he had an
active interest in book-collectingand had built up
a remarkablelibrary, concernedwith the impact
of literature, of newideas in literature, uponlife.
Anassiduous reader of The Times Literary Sup-
pfleraent,
or critical he had a sharp eye and good memory
or bibliographicaldetails.
If a biography of him is ever written, com-
petently written, he will be seen as a manwho
Topics
was successful in several different spheres of
action, and whomade full use of his lease of
life. Whenhis health was no longer good, it
was impossible to imagine him settling down
to the existence of a prudent invalid obsessed
with tryiug to makeit last as long as possible.
I think he knewhe had, as they say, "had it."
In his will he generously left meand two or
three other friends some money to be spent
within a year on some "extravagance." I would
rather he had survived me. No extravagance by
us can disguise though it may commemorate
his absence. Whatever the moneyis spent on
I shall think of him looking over myshoulder,
curiousto see howit is beingused, a little ironic
and (I hope)pleased.
William Plomer

Letter fiom NewYork

The Goldwater Ddbacle

By Richard Hofstadter
ry~ HERE ARE TIMES general belief that Goldwateris a threat to the

~
,
~~ 1. whenit is a pleasure
to acknowledgethat one
~..,’,.,, "~:’i~.’. has been wrong. Writing
"
on the Goldwater move-
\ mentin the Octoberissue
of E~com,~R, I con-
21~
~ eluded that "it is now
"?’~:,’~~[~,r,..:~.,~’
"’ mucheasier than before
to believe that America
is visibly sick with a malady that maydo all
of us in." This was said, as the setting made
clear, in the belief not that Barry Goldwater
would win--which never seemed likely--but
rather that he might make a respectable show-
ing, and that if he did Goldwaterismwould be
entrenched in the Republican party for the
calculable future with incalculably mischievous
consequences.
As it turned out, Goldwater’sshowingwas far
from respectable. The vote was unmistakably
cast against hira. Almosteverywherehe ran far
behind other Republicans, drawing a total 7-5
million less than Richard Nixonin x96o, a drop
of 229to. Aboveall, the election registers a
PROFESSORRICHARDHOI~’ST.t, DTER contributed
a much-discussedpre-election essay to the
Oaober ENCOUNteR. sHis best-known book
are studies o] TheAmerican Political Tradi-
tion and Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life.
peace, and it provides a stronger mandatefor
continuity in our foreign policies. Althoughwe
have not yet finished reckoning with what Gold-
water represents, we can at least say that the
maladyso frighteningly displayed at San Fran-
cisco has been contained, and can hope that the
CowPalace convention may come to be seen as
the high tide of the radical right.
No doubt to many observers abroad, more
than 26 million votes and almost 39~’~ of the
total will seem ominouslyhigh for a candidate
with Goldwater’s special and dangerous view of
the world. In a way it is, but this misfortune
was entailed in July by the disaster of Gold-
water’s nomination. It must be remembered
that under our party system even Jack the
Ripper, with a major-party label on him, could
hopeto get close to 40°//0 of the votes. If the vote
exaggeratesright-wing strength, it also measures
its outer limits. It is a safe guessthat at best not
more than half of the Goldwater voters agree
ardently ’with his ideas, and that the rest sup-
ported him out of party loyalty. The central
question is whether the Goldwatercultists can
hold the Republicanparty, and nowthe odds are
heavily against them.
The results makegrim reading for Republican
party leaders. Theylost twoseats in the Senate,
where they are nowoutnumbered68-32, and 39
in the House where they are now outnumbered
296-139. Twoof their most promising young

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