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I enjoy swimming as well. But I find running very boring. I'm reading a biography of Busby Berkeley and apparently lots of his best ideas came to him in the bath. This is not uncommon. Peter Cook did a sketch inspired by the idea: "A great number of things come to me in the bath, mainly mosquitoes and adders, but in this case a rather stupendous idea."
Partner! You Have Triumphed My Ace… (Daily Graphic, Sept. 28, 1949)
By I.L.F. [Ian Lancaster Fleming]
Did you know that “trump” was originally “triumph”? Did you know that spades, hearts, diamonds, clubs were originally swords, cups, coins and staves, representing the nobility, the clergy, tradesmen, and peasants—the main social classes of the Middle Ages?
Have you reflected that not even the French Revolution or the Communists succeeded in replacing the kings and queens in the pack with other symbols, and were you aware that Wild Bill Hickock shot all the pips out of a ten of spades at twelve paces?
Not me, and I still don’t know the rules of “Canasta,” the new card game which is sweeping America on the heels of gin rummy, after reading The Complete Card Player, by Albert Ostrow (The Bodley Head, 15s.). Nor do I know the latest contract bridge rules and I don’t know the odds for drawing a card at “chemin de fer.” These are serious lapses in an American card encyclopaedia “which should challenge Hoyle as the general reference book.”
But if you want to play Bimbo high-low at poker, Blind Hookey, Cedarhurst Gin, Clobberyash, Double-dummy with a widow, Idiot’s Delight, Oh Pshaw, Seven-toed Pete or Stealing the Old Man’s Bundle—this is the book for you.
The biography--Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley, by Jeffrey Spivak--was rather disappointing. Clumsily written, and too much description of the films rather than analysis. Not much about intellectual influences, aside from the useful information that Man Ray's photograph "Woman smoking a cigarette" was copied for the opening shot of "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935. I haven't yet read the section on The Gang's All Here because I haven't yet seen the film (but I did buy the Blu-Ray).
Another book I picked up, Showstoppers: Busby Berkeley and the Tradition of Spectacle, by Martin Rubin, is academic in tone, very intelligent, and points out the continuity between Berkeley's film work and the stage musicals that preceded it. So he was not entirely sui generis. The book also does a better job of analyzing Berkeley's work than Spivak.
If I'm stuck on something I'm writing, the answer often occurs to me just as I'm stepping out of the shower.
I conclude that my Muse is a perv.
Gamesmanship. By Stephen Potter. (Rupert Hart-Davis. 6s.)
By Ian Fleming
On the analogy of white lies, this little book is an aid to the white cheat, hereafter referred to as a “gamesman.” We have all met gamesmen and perhaps been defeated by their gamesmanship. It has fallen to Mr. Potter to be their first champion, the first chronicler of their “ploys” and, who knows, perhaps the subversive guide towards a new golden age in British sport when Ryder Cups, Ashes and the goblets of Wimbledon, Henley and the Olympics will all come home again.
After some introductory remarks on the history and origin of gamesmanship, the author proceeds to the “flurry” ploy, of which the basic axiom is “the first muscle stiffened (in the opponent) is the first point gained.”
His description of preparations for leaving home in the opponent’s car en route for the tennis courts is a workmanlike summary of the “primary hampers” which all of us have experienced at the hands of gamesmen. (There is a helpful “Sketch Plan to show specimen wrong route from Maida Vale to Dulwich Covered Courts.”) While touching on “clothesmanship” and “stakesmanship” the author sounds a note of warning against the counter-gamesman, and readers will be wise to draw wider conclusions than are suggested by the single example, the “Frith-Morteroy Counter.”
Reading on, it will seem to many gamesmen that the “Jack Rivers opening” is weak. I prefer the more deadly “Huntercombe” variant (not mentioned by Potter) which goes like this. On the first tee: Gamesman: “I say, did you see that article of Cotton’s in the ‘Lancet’?” Opponent: “No, what did he say?” Gamesman: “Well it seems you breathe in on your upswing and out on the downswing, and the point is I’m sure he’s wrong. I do just the opposite. Let’s see what we really do during this round and we can write in a letter shooting him down.”
Potter is on firmer ground in his remarks on “Basic Fluke Play” and I concur when he states categorically that there are only eighteen ways of saying “Bad luck”; but many will think that his chapters on Brinkmanship, Clubmanship, etc., are amateurish and even naive, and readers will have little faith in his rudimentary advice to card players. (He does not even touch on “Voice Control” in husband and wife partnerships at the bridge table!)
I have said enough to show that, though not definitive, Potter on Gamesmanship is a Christmas “must” for partners and opponents and for anonymous despatch to “that woman” at the Bridge club. Colonel Frank Wilson’s diagrams and illustrations, particularly his anatomical chart of the golfer’s stance on the putting green (show to opponent in the third week) are in the best tradition of English Sporting Prints.
I'm glad to hear you've read the book--most of the titles in this thread are now among the less checked-out books in the library.
By Ian Fleming
The decline in the Faculty of Attention is neither new nor peculiar to America (Wordsworth remarked upon it in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads nearly 150 years ago), but America has developed to a finer art than we the technique of attracting without actually engaging attention. Hollywood, the Tabloids, the Comics, the Shiny magazines, the Digests, Radio and “Video” provide a daily dish of premasticated pulp which is rapidly conditioning the American palate away from any mental fare whose absorption requires an effort. (Hollywood is filming The Forsyte Saga under the title of That Forsyte Gal because “Saga” is considered a “difficult” word.)
In order to sell their 15s. novels (the standard price), American book-factories (as opposed to reputable publishers ) tempt the reluctant reader’s appetite by pressure-salesmanship of brightly wrappered sop-stuff—the title of this report is from a well-known blurb—with the result that writers and readers “with teeth in them are a rapidly dying race in America.”
James Marquand, for instance, has at last produced that bedtime story in swansdown prose towards which some of his recent work has, alas, been hinting. Point of No Return, which has led the fiction bestsellers for months past, is an agreeable meander through the life and pale loves of a character who closely resembles that American comic ineffectual, Mr. Milquetoast. These are harsh words, but from a sincere admirer of H. M. Pulham, Esq. and So Little Time.
Leading the general list is Cheaper by the Dozen (coming from Heinemann on October 10), a most engaging piece of real-life whimsy which describes the methods used to educate the 12 children of Mr. Gilbreth, an American consulting engineer and efficiency expert. Written by two of his children, it comes in much the same package as The Egg and I, which sold a million in America last year and has since done very well over here. Some religious books are being widely read, and there are many popular pink pills for pale psyches, such as Peace of Soul, Peace of Mind, The Mature Mind and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
It is sad to have to predict that admirers of John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 will find themselves disappointed with The Rage to Live, the wearisome chronicle of a Pennsylvania family with a viper named Grace Caldwell in its bosom. This windy saga is not redeemed by extreme coarseness in parts, and it has the worst contrived ending of any novel I can remember.
Another casualty is Marc Brandel, whose adult and macabre Ides of Summer found him a discriminating English public last year. The Barriers Between is full of the turgid ruminations of a sensitive ex-G.I., whose heavy drinking in Mexico is too much for his sensitive stomach.
It is pleasant to be able to record that English authors continue in handsome demand. Mr. Churchill’s Their Finest Hour still outstrips all domestic war memoirs published this year and qualifies him for his newest laurels as chief literary dollar-earner for England (and top scrivener, for Sir Stafford!). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is also having a phenomenal success. Featured by Life and then by The Reader’s Digest, this brilliant book is more than repeating its reception in England. Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate is a best-seller, as was her The Pursuit of Love, despite the unfamiliar idiom and cliquishness of this comedy of lost manners. Spencer Chapman’s The Jungle is Neutral is proving an excellent corrective to the American popular theory that we never fought the Japanese.
Finally, a book which will do much for our battered self-esteem, Our English Heritage, by Gerald Johnson. Mr. Commager, in The New York Times, concludes a review which would make all England blush with the words: “Every nation inherits a good part of its culture and its institutions. The United States has been fortunate because its inheritance comes from a nation whose peculiar contribution to civilisation has been integrity of character.”
Note: The Hollywood film of The Forsyte Saga was eventually titled That Forsyte Woman. Released in 1949, it starred Errol Flynn, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Robert Young.
I haven't read H. M. Pulham, Esq. (or anything else by the now-forgotten John P. Marquand), but I can recommend the film version, directed by the great King Vidor and starring the brainy and beautiful Hedy Lamarr.
From Ian Fleming
Tipping is a pestiferous business and it would be a wonderful thing if U.N.E.S.C.O. or the U.N. Commission on Human Rights would establish a World Tipping Code. On my last night in the Ocean Belle my advice on the subject was sought by a group of three American couples bearing names which you would know.
My eyes started from my head as each couple showed its hand. “I always give my cabin steward £20.” “We’ve done a lot of entertaining in the Veranda Grill and we're dividing £40 between the head waiter and the two others” “Would £5 be enough for the Turkish Bath man?” “And what about you?”
I was torn between various emotions. My feelings for the working-man triumphed. “I think you're being very generous,” I said. “You’ll certainly all get an extra couple of teeth in the farewell smile.”
Under cover of their rather thin laughter I escaped with my pair of jacks unseen. For the four nights, I tipped my cabin steward £2. He seemed perfectly happy.
***
These Names Make Bad News
For a time the Coronation (“It’s going to mean a great religious revival round the world” is a comment I have heard several times) ousted McCarthy as topic “A” in New York and I believe throughout America, but now he is top-billing again, and you simply can’t stop talking about him or reading about him.
There are various reasons for this: he has a really expert publicity machine, he is always springing or cooking-up a new surprise, people are terrified and fascinated by him, and “he may be a sonofabitch but, darn it, he's always right.” Homosexuals in the State Department, British ships trading with China, un-American books in American embassies abroad.
Each scandalous broadside has missed with ninety-nine calumnies and hit with one. And that one is enough in a country where every man is born with a chance to be President and where, in consequence, every man aches to prove the Administration wrong. McCarthy is just pressing the trigger of a gun which is loaded and aimed by a huge cross-section of the public.
Walter Winchell has been doing much the same thing for thirty years, and he goes on doing it on radio and TV to a guaranteed public of around ten million every week. Is there a connection between them? And what role does Edgar Hoover of the F.B.I. play in all this, the Washington Fouché who has controlled the American secret police for the amazing span of twenty-seven years? These three men are the recipients of all the private grudges of America. They are the overt and covert crusaders against un-Americanism. The sun would indeed be darkened if history were to bring them together, or any closer together, before this giant country has found itself.
***
Tales from Kinseyland
But August 20 is K-Day and on that morning one topic will sweep away all others. For on that day will be published Dr. Kinsey’s “Sexual Report on the Human Female,” and on that day every newspaper, every dinner-table, will go hog-wild.
The Report is completed and scarifying tales and rumours are leaking out of the peaceful, beautiful campus of Indiana University where what might be described as semesters are being held to allow newspaper and magazine men (and women) to digest the huge tome and squeeze out the meatiest three-thousand word thesis for release in each paper on K-Day. Not a word more than 3,000 or someone will reach for a lawyer.
So far two semesters have been held. One in May and one in June. And there is another to come.
***
Jottings on a Nylon Cuff
Canasta has become the favourite card game of America, leading Contract Bridge by ten per cent.—a wide margin. Bolivia is the name of a new variation I do not intend to learn. Bolivia is really a standardisation of Samba, which I have also eschewed. Three packs. Going-out requires a sequence canasta and a regular canasta. Wild card canastas score 2,500 points. Black threes left in your hand cost a hundred points each against you. Game is 15,000 points. Who do you think is touring America promoting it? Who but that Queen of the Green Baize, our old friend Ottilie H. Reilly.
***
The latest and most deadly way of making a dry martini is to pour a little dry vermouth into a jug, swirl it round and throw it down the sink. Fill Jug with gin and place in ice-box until tomorrow. Then serve (or drink from Jug). Note that there is no wasteful dilution with ice-cubes.
***
The germ-consciousness of America is rapidly becoming a phobia, battened on by doctors, druggists and advertisers. People actually prefer foods that are frozen or tinned or preserved. They are more hygienic. And what about this? Brown eggs are virtually unobtainable in New York. “Customers won’t touch ‘em,” my Super-Market told me. “They’re dirty.”
***
Fifty-cent Angels
Broadway Angels Inc. has made a Common Stock issue of 570,000 shares at fifty cents a share to allow “the small investor an opportunity to employ funds in diversified enterprises connected with the Broadway Theatre.” The stock will be traded on the “Over-the-Counter-Market.” The issue was made on March 1 and the President of the Company, a Mr. Wallace Garland, tells me it is already three-quarters subscribed by some 2,000 investors.
“Of course, you can lose 100 per cent. of the capital invested in one show,” said Mr. Garland. “But look at ‘Voice of the Turtle,’ 3,000 per cent, profit. ‘Mister Roberts,’ 500 per cent profit. ‘Harvey,’ 4,000 per cent, profit. Do you think the British would be interested?”
“I’m sure they would be,” I said. “I'll tell them about it.”
(P.S. “Show Business” tells me that normally the angel has a thirty-seventy chance of making his money back. And of course, there’s Treasury permission to get. But it would be fine to own a piece of Ethel Merman.)
Sounds good to me.
There should be some discussion thread for these things.
"To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen 'like a ray of sunlight through a window — leaving it unbroken.'
"Another crucial recommendation is that the ice be so cold and hard that it won't melt, since nothing's worse than a watery martini. For those who are still with me, let me give you my personal recipe, the fruit of long experimentation and guaranteed to produce perfect results. The day before your guests arrive, put all the ingredients — glasses, gin, and shaker — in the refrigerator. Use a thermometer to make sure the ice is about twenty degrees below zero (centigrade). Don't take anything out until your friends arrive; then pour a few drops of Noilly Prat and half a demitasse spoon of Angostura bitters over the ice. Shake it, then pour it out, keeping only the ice, which retains a faint taste of both. Then pour straight gin over the ice, shake it again, and serve."
By Ian Fleming
Fernando Henriques: Family and Colour in Jamaica. With a Preface by Meyer Fortes. Eyre and Spottiswoode. 18s.
There are about 250 million Negroes in the world and one of the great problems of this and future generations lies in promoting their happiness and well-being. Over the centuries, this will only be achieved by an extension of the colour bar so that part of the earth’s surface—perhaps the African continent—becomes a Negro dominion or reserve, or else by progressive removal of the colour bar until, through miscegenation, the entire population of the world is coffee-coloured. In England, until very recently, we barely perceived the problem. The solitary blackamoor was a nursery figure, a pet. In the plural he was a horde of fuzzy-wuzzies to be handled with glass beads or machine-guns.
But suddenly, almost since the war, the picture has changed; or rather our eyes, educated in humanity by the twentieth-century blaze of social enlightenment, see it differently. Suddenly we perceive the Negro as a tragically unhappy man ridden by a sense of inferiority which accompanies him, like a deformity, from the schoolroom to the grave. In our sympathy we lavish education and culture and medicine upon him only to be pained when, with advancement, he reaches for the weapons we once used against him and turns them upon us—weapons of legal and political argument, weapons of “giant powder” and steel. Floundering, we bomb him in one colony and in another invite him to fork-lunches at the Residency. Here he is a tool of Moscow, there he gets the O.B.E. Now he is pacified with a new constitution, then he is threatened with a battleship. Whichever way we attempt to disintegrate the black cloud on the horizon, it still remains larger than a man’s hand and, to those who think about it, just as menacing as if it were shaped like a mushroom.
Mr. Henriques is a social anthropologist and, while he might be indulgent towards these generalizations, in Family and Colour in Jamaica it has been his concern to focus a microscope over a small portion of this black cloud and to provide a detailed field-study of the mesh of colour relationships that exist even in a community as politically advanced and socially enlightened as Jamaica. The result is not only a valuable contribution to social science but a work of general interest, written with intelligence and sympathy.
The author, himself a member of a famous Jamaican family still prominent in the island, is lecturer in social anthology in the University of Leeds. It was thus not difficult for him to return to Jamaica and move among the people with intimacy and yet with eyes wide open. He concentrated on the County of Portland and its capital, Port Antonio, and his minute focus on the habits of and customs of this parish provides some of his most interesting passages of descriptive reporting. But it is his examination of the minutiae of colour relationships within Negro society that brings out the bitter colour warfares that accompany the usual economic class struggles.
“Colour,” he emphasizes, “is evaluated in terms of actual colour, hair formation, features and skin textures,” allowing for infinite combinations all of which have social significance. Thus, a dark person with “good” hair and features ranks above a fairer person with “bad” hair and features, and so on. Families become divided on colour lines, but in other spheres there are even greater frustrations. Choice of a career, promotion, public and private acceptance by others, marriage, in fact all social position is largely determined by colour. Even poverty plays a secondary part. Always there is that dreadful moment, generally at school, when some incident on the playground, some remark overheard in the street, will suddenly bring home to the little black boy that the fair boy will have the advantage of him for the rest of his life. It is no wonder that the conclusions reached by this stimulating and humane author are not encouraging, and the only disappointing feature of the book lies in the absence of some brave and thought-provoking suggestions for the future which would stir our minds as well as our hearts.
One of Our Submarines. By Edward Young. (Hart-Davis. 18s.)
By Ian Fleming
We make terrible mistakes at the beginning of all our wars, but the worst of them is the failure to give the maximum number of people a chance to fight the enemy from the very day war is declared. The National Defence Club is hard to join. Anyone not on a waiting list gets passed, from one “Sorry, old man” to the next until his ardour and patriotism are as scuffed as his shoe leather.
To be a round peg in a round hole in wartime is rare and priceless. Edward Young was one of the fortunate. Of the three Services, the Navy is the shop most tightly closed. It has to be. Irresponsibility or inefficiency by any one man in a ship is far more dangerous and expensive than the failure of his opposite number in the normal run of service in the Army or Air Force. And the citadel of this closed shop is the Submarine Service. A week-end yachtsman, Young was graciously admitted into the R.N.V.R., and then by a fluke had a chance of volunteering for submarines. He was accepted, completed his training, moved from ship to ship just, it seemed, as the one he left was doomed, was given the first R.N.V.R. command in the history of submarines, and dodged depth-charges and disaster in the same ship until he ended the war in her with the rank of Commander and with the D.S.O., D.S.C. and Bar. A wonderful war for one young civilian. How many other fine men were lost on the clumsy machine?
One Of Our Submarines is in the very highest rank of books about the last war. Submarines are thrilling beasts and Edward Young tells of four years’ adventures in them in a good stout book with excitement on every page. He writes beautifully, economically and with humour, and in the actions he commands he manages to put the reader at the voice-pipe and the periscope so that sometimes the tension is so great that one has to put the book down.
The author tells us little about himself, which is a pity, for the hints which penetrate through his modest cloak of self-effacement make us wish for more of his personal reactions as he climbed towards the final solitary pinnacle of command. It is interesting that when he reaches that pinnacle the writing seems to become slightly constrained and the earlier attractive freedom of comment and expression gives place to the voice of authority as he takes his deadly tube against the Japanese.
To anyone who has served in submarines it will not be surprising that the little communities he describes are so happy and so closely knit. A sociologist would probably say that the ship’s company of a submarine represents the highest form of democratic unity—from fifty to a hundred men, the duties of each one vital to the safety of all of them, social barriers impossible, discipline automatic and perfectly comprehended, successes and failures completely shared and always the subconscious framework of permanent danger to override and control the selfish instincts of the individual.
All this comes out in One of Our Submarines and the book is a fine tribute to a happy and gallant Service. But what a wonderful setting for a novel—a Caine Mutiny of the Submarine Service! Mr. Young is exceptionally qualified to write it.
Man The Ropes. By Augustine Courtauld. (Hodder & Stoughton. 12s. 6d.)
This is the autobiography of a man upon whom it seemed that the sun would always shine.
It is true that innumerable governesses and school-masters beat Augustine Courtauld for various types of rebellion, and that much of his later life consisted of getting in and out of scrapes with authority and equally uneven battles with resistentialist sun, ice, rock and sea: but the tough, gay quixotry of Augustine Courtauld always won.
At one time, in 1931, when the world’s press was full of the youth missing for five months in an ice hut in the Arctic, it seemed that here was another Edgar Christian destined to a young, lonely death in the midst of one of those tom-boy expeditions into the Frozen North. But his hero, Gino Watkins, soon himself to die in the Arctic, found Courtauld as Courtauld knew he would.
There were more adventures in the Arctic; then marriage to Mollie Montgomery, and to Duet, his dream-ship, which is still part of the family. Then came the war. To me these are the best chapters: when Courtauld, Polar Medal, Watchkeeper’s Certificate and all tried to enroll in the exclusive club that was the Navy and could get no further than a Civil Servant’s job in the Naval Intelligence Division. He was put in the Scandinavian Section, which was in charge of an expert on Egypt. One day the latest intelligence on the Swedish Fleet was asked for. Courtauld hunted through the files and produced a solitary, dog-eared “secret report” dated many years previously, which announced that “owing to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease the manoeuvres of the Swedish main fleet would be cancelled.” Many such incidents went into Courtauld’s early attempts to win the war and they make splendid, ironical reading. At last he got into M.T.B.s and then into the abortive Arctic Commando under “Red” Ryder, the V.C. of St. Nazaire, which ended with the murder in Belsen of the small party which finally got to Norway. Courtauld was transferred to a destroyer and then to ferrying landing-craft across the Atlantic.
VE Day came and Courtauld went back to his family, to Spencers, his beautiful house in Essex, and to Duet. It looked as if the sun would go on shining for him until suddenly the Almighty decided that Courtauld’s life had been too happy. He turned off the sunshine. Christopher, the eldest boy of six children, caught polio, from which it took the Courtaulds three years to rescue him. Neuritis struck Augustine and put him in a wheelchair, for the rest of his life. Mollie had a long nervous breakdown. The storms of Fate blew and went on blowing.
Now at last the skies have cleared again and the battered ship is back on an even keel. This splendid, gay little book of very English adventures is one of the results. All Augustine Courtauld’s life is in the Masefield quotation from which the title comes:
The power of man is as his hopes
In darkest night, the cocks are crowing.
With the sea roaring and the wind blowing;
Adventure. Man the ropes.
Future Indefinite. By Noel Coward. (Heinemann, 21s.)
By Ian Fleming
Noel Coward is one of the most remarkable men of the century whose age (he is in his fifty-fifth year) he shares. Genius is not a word to be thrown about carelessly, but any man who can succeed in giving pleasure, in most of the creative media, to half the inhabitants of the world for thirty years must possess a measure of it.
Much of his secret lies in his passionate professionalism. A master of technique, he works extremely hard and with minute accuracy, discipline and integrity. The second volume of his autobiography shows all these qualities, and it may thus seem very unfair to complain that in this admirably written book it is just these professional virtues that sometimes obtrude upon the narrative. If only he had thrown away those diaries. If only he had not bothered so much about dates and places and ships and planes. If only he had not found it necessary to put the record straight about his war service, his court case on a currency offence, the incident of the “Brooklyn Boys.”
Mr. Coward’s public life has demonstrated that he is a man of courage, devotion to duty and patriotism. If he had done nothing more during the war years than produce In Which We Serve, he would have done as much for the Allied cause as any man in his profession; yet in this vastly readable and entertaining book there occasionally creeps in a rather querulous note of self-justification which seems out of place in a man of his attainments. But when he forgets the critic inside himself who has always been his sternest mentor and when he thinks only of the reader he provides a scintillating picture of his life before and during the war.
On every page there are passages of brilliant observation, wit and humanity, which allow one to hope that when his third volume, Past Imperfect, comes to be written, he will forget his own private pains and write only according to his particular genius, which is to give pleasure to intelligent people.
By Ian Fleming
In the United States the literary event of the year has been the publication of the first of five volumes of Mr. Churchill’s war memoirs entitled The Gathering Storm. The New York Times and Life have published long extracts from the book, as has The Daily Telegraph in England, and now a further huge section of the American public will read this great English adventure story by Britain’s first citizen.
The efforts of our official propaganda organisations are small beer beside the vast American audience created by Mr. Churchill, and it is debatable whether the handiwork of any other single Englishman will bring in more hard currency this year. The Gathering Storm, which has been acclaimed by the critics with “rave” but reverent notices, deals with the prelude to war—in the author’s words, “How the English-speaking peoples through their unwisdom, carelessness and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm”—and with the Twilight War, ending in May, 1940. The volume (nearly 800 pages with the appendices) closes with Mr. Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.
Due largely to the shortage .of paper and cloth, the majority of the British public will not read this great segment of their own history until Messrs. Cassell publish the volume here in September.
Few other major works of general interest have appeared. "Vinegar” Joe Stilwell’s posthumous and peppery memoirs of the Burma campaign have not been praised, and Mr. Sumner Welles’s We Need Not Fail has made no stir. Dr. Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male still leads the best-sellers for the worst reasons. In fact, it is a stodgy agglomeration of statistics and graphs whose findings will be treated with respect by the medical authorities to whom it is addressed. The Hatfields and the McCoys, by Virgil Jones, is an exciting piece of folklore retelling the story of the famous family feud on the Kentucky-West Virginia border. The Harvard University Press are publishing the definitive Letters of Edgar Allan Poe in October.
English authors are well represented by Edward Crankshaw’s Russia and the Russians and by Simon Nowell Smith’s scholarly piece of Henry James research, The Legend of the Master, and English novelists easily lead a barren fiction field. Evelyn Waugh’s piece of side-splitting necrophilia, The Loved One, which has so far only appeared here in Horizon (Chapman & Hall are to publish in book form), has been greeted with masochistic ecstasy, and Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter has been chosen as the Book of the Month.
Forthcoming volumes include a new James M. Cain The Moth; The Sky and the Forest, a tale of Africa by C. S. Forester; No High Way, by Nevil Shute; and Ape and Essence, a new Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World vein. Ernest Hemingway’s long new novel is said to be maturing slowly.
American books are only qualitatively absent from this short survey. The output of literary chewing-gum continues apace, but the public is surfeited, probably owing to “an unfortunate combination of higher prices and lower quality,” as the Saturday Review of Literature puts it. The publishers moan and groan, but the drumming of the book clubs, the tireless superlatives of reviewers, and ever shinier book jackets are of no avail and, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a slump is a slump is a slump.
By Ian Fleming
Pleasure Island: the book of Jamaica. Edited by Esther Chapman. (Chantry Publications. 21s.)
There should be a series of Baedeker-Michelin guides to the British Empire. I offer the suggestion with respectful urgency to the Ministries concerned and to the Colonial Development Corporation.
Esther Chapman’s guide book to Jamaica provides an excellent model, edited as it is with intelligence and common sense. There should be a better map of the island, and the section devoted to the local fauna could be improved, but in a beautifully illustrated book of twenty-one chapters covering everything of interest to a tourist or a resident such minor criticisms are captious. Esther Chapman has done a great service to Jamaica.
***
Island in the Sun (Sunday Times, January 12, 1958)
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica. By Peter Abrahams. (Corona Library: H.M. Stationery Office. 25s.)
There ought to be a Baedeker series on the British Commonwealth. Living small lives in this dull little Island at its centre, we have no idea of the fabulous lands and islands in the sun that are linked to us by history, speech and currency. Not even distance separates us now that you can be in the Caribbean in twenty or Singapore in forty hours’ flying time—only poverty and, more important, our cliff-girt mentality.
While waiting for the philanthropist who will finance the series, the next best thing is the Corona Library, sponsored by the Colonial Office, an imaginative and luxuriously conceived project which has brilliantly examined Hongkong, Sierra Leone, Nyasaland, British Guiana, and now Jamaica.
Jamaica is rather more serious-minded than some of the others, and Mr. Peter Abrahams’s treatment is thorough rather than seductive. The flora and fauna, for instance, which, with the landscape, are Jamaica's glory, are given short shrift compared with politics, administration and various aspects of development and welfare; but the latter are admirably handled, generally with entertaining and illuminating scraps of conversation with the Jamaican man-in-the-street.
The production is up to the very high Corona standards, and the line drawings by Rosemary Grimble, daughter of “Grimble of the Islands,” are particularly attractive and apposite.
The Sunday Times asked three men to go to the Motor Show and to give their uninhibited views on what they found there. Two are family motorists, the third a famous racing driver. Their views have been kept deliberately non-technical. This was the “panel” of critics:
STIRLING MOSS has owned several small family saloons, the most recent a Standard 8 fitted with a 10 h.p. engine.
IAN FLEMING drives a Ford Thunderbird which is the envy of his friends.
GODFREY SMITH fits a wife and a baby daughter into a 1955 Morris Minor.
The place, Earls Court, on the day of the preview. The critics begin:
FLEMING: Nothing really startling this year. The usual difficulty in choosing between too many models with much the same good English qualities. Most of the cars are, as usual, too good for the drivers.
SMITH: There’s no doubt that this will go down in history as the two-pedal car Show. I think our manufacturers deserve a pat on the back for the way they’ve got them into production.
MOSS: I wish there had been a few more gimmicks to attract people to British cars. Rovers have done it with their turbine. And look at the crowds round that Buick Centurion mock-up. Heaven knows when it will be in production, but it’s full of blueprint ideas. I’m surprised that at least the B.M.C. doesn’t have a “Car of the Future” to get us all excited. Well, we’ve got to start somewhere. Let’s start in the millionaire’s class. The Rolls is still supreme, of course. It’s a name that commands affection all over the world.
FLEMING: I’m sorry the old basketwork Rolls has gone for ever. Incidentally, I gather it’s quite untrue they ever thought of turning out a £2,000 Rolls-Royce. Just a rumour. Their S Series Bentley is the most successful car Rolls have ever built. Waiting list of over a year. I’ve tried one, it’s like driving a Swiss watch.
SMITH: I must say I hanker after the Continental, but there really ought to be more luggage space in a car of that price. You can hardly get one normal suitcase into the boot. I’d like to see what the Italian coachbuilders could do with it.
MOSS: But for real Lord Mayor comfort give me that big Daimler. There’s room for six in the back. It’s practically a drawing-room on wheels.
FLEMING: I’m glad to hear Daimler’s have fitted a new heater. I’ve never known an engine run so coolly, but, as a result, the heater just didn’t heat.
SMITH: I think the companies should give one a total guarantee for accessories and the accessory firms should issue a guarantee to the motor manufacturers. If I buy a new suit and the buttons break my tailor replaces them. He doesn’t send me hunting round London after the button manufacturer.
MOSS: I agree. What I want is a really truthful petrol gauge that doesn't say “empty” when I’ve got another 50 miles’ driving in hand (or vice versa), windscreen wipers that don’t make a noise, and long window handles that move the window up and down with one stroke. But let’s get back to cars. Here’s the Aston Martin. Lovely car, and that body design is truly original. Stacks of room for luggage, all-round visibility and good driving positions. I’m not impressed by that open Superleggera model. Looks nice enough but visibility is poor, and there’s hardly room for anything but a small blonde with a sponge bag. May be all right for Italy. It’s the same old problem: how to marry the beautiful and the practical.
SMITH: Don’t you think the Fords come closest to doing that?
MOSS: I do. I think their styling is probably the most up to date in this country.
FLEMING: The Riley owners used to be some of the staunchest fans in motoring, but I think, since the B.M.C. took over Rileys, the fans have been slipping away. Rileys seem to be rather the ugly duckling of the B.M.C. group. All the brains seem to be going into the Austins and Morrises. Look at the Austin Healeys. They ought to bring out a Riley-Healey, and get a bit of zest back into the car.
SMITH: They’ve let Jaguar get the edge on them.
MOSS: Marvellous cars. Jaguar performance in racing since the war is one of the things we can really be proud of. Wonderful workmanship and finish. I can’t see how they do it for the price.
FLEMING: Pretty imposing front view on the new one but I don’t see why they need all those lamps and horns and traffic signals. There are ten of them altogether.
SMITH: They could have put the horns behind the radiator grille and put the traffic lights into the sidelights.
MOSS: Here’s the new Rover 105. Rover owners are still as faithful as Riley owners used to be. I’m not surprised. They’ve always built a good, car and they’ve always been forward-looking. Don’t know when this turbine model of theirs will be on the road. It’ll be quite a race with Detroit, but it’s going to be a new kind of motoring when it comes. But take the 105. It’s a genuine two-pedal car, and what’s so extraordinary about it is that it’s the only British company with its own automatic transmission and torque converter. Usual good Rover driving lay-out, and plenty of room for parcels.
SMITH: One of the reasons why It has always been a favourite with women.
MOSS: Women don’t have to worry about their comforts so much nowadays. All the big manufacturers look after them. Take the styling of that Austin Estate car. I really like that red and white combination. Their colours are some of the most dashing in the Show. It’s a big selling point, now people are less conservative about colour schemes.
FLEMING: The Armstrong Siddeley is another luxurious affair at a reasonable price. Wonderfully silent engine and as fast as you like, though I think the springing’s a bit soft for really fast driving. You can’t get that comfortable ride and still go round corners at sixty.
MOSS: They’ve tightened it up on the 238, but I think its looks could be improved. There’s a sort of downward slant about the bonnet which I don’t like. Here are Bristols next door. Good fast cars and a clean, handsome body without any nonsense. They make that 2-litre work pretty hard, but it seems to like it. Rather a dull stand with just two drab-coloured cars. One of their competition models would have livened it up.
SMITH: They’ve certainly put some work into my Morris Minor. I’d like to see a long road test between this 1,000 model and the Volkswagen. I hear that the gearbox is a beauty. And I’m delighted to find they’ve put more steam in the engine.
FLEMING: I haven’t tried either of them, but I’d rather have the Morris or the little Austin every time. At least you have an engine in front of you in case you hit something. In the Volkswagen there’s nothing under that bonnet except perhaps a suitcase.
MOSS: But here’s the M.G. I must say I like the appearance of the new hard-top. I only hope that it won’t be too noisy inside. If your father has promised you a sports car for your twenty-first birthday, there are plenty to choose from these days. There's the M.G., the Austin Healey (I like those bright colours they've laid on for the American market) and the new six-cylinder should be a smooth job. Then there’s the Triumph with disc brakes on the front wheels—they’ll all be having them in time I expect—and now there's the little Berkeley, which is pretty good value at £575. It’s stripped to essentials, but somebody had plenty of initiative to put a really cheap sports car on the road. The man on the stand says they’ve got orders of upwards of 5,000 already. Anyway, I'd like to be 21 again with all those to choose from.
FLEMING: What about the Citroen? Have you tried it? I gather they’re having plenty of trouble with it in France. It’s so revolutionary there aren’t many garages who can repair it if anything goes wrong. It came out a bit too quickly, I dare say. But Frenchmen rave about it.
MOSS: It’s probably the most comfortable jar in the show, and packed full of brilliant ideas. Huge boot, wonderful visibility and every kind of gadget. It deserves to succeed and I think it certainly will once it has settled down. Let's have a look at the Skoda and see what they’re doing on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Of course this is very much a Show model. But it’s got plenty of bright ideas too—propeller-shaft running through the main chassis member, independent front and rear springing, and notice those aluminium fittings. I don’t know why we don’t take to them instead of chrome. You’ll find them on that Swiss-bodied Alvis, too. Another fine-looking car. But this Skoda looks a workmanlike Job. Rather austere, but I suppose it’s made for rather austere people.
SMITH: Is there anything else you notice looking round the Show?
MOSS: I like the new Station Wagon models. There’ll be more of them. They’re ideal for a family and particularly for holidays abroad, and the coach builders like Grosvenor and Abbott have got a fine line into them. Wheel trims are much smarter. Take a look at the Austins. There’s still too much chrome about. Vauxhalls make such a good car that I don’t know why they have to smother it in the stuff. The same applies to those tiny chrome strips on the face of the Singer. Finish seems to be getting better and better, and I hope basic workmanship is keeping up with It. Prices on balance seem more or less constant, but we're getting more for our money—extra instruments for example. That’s about all. There’s quite a lot to be proud of here. If we’ve criticised a bit, so will the other people who come to the Show.
FLEMING: If you could have your pick of the cars, what would it be?
MOSS: I’ll have an Aston Martin DB 2.4 saloon, if you’ll quieten the engine a trifle. Off-white and silver-green.
SMITH: I’ll have a Continental Bentley.
FLEMING: An Austin 105 Station Wagon for me. Elephant’s-breath grey.
MOSS: One thing we do agree on, then. We’re all going to go on driving British.
Notes: As we'll see next week, Fleming did not buy that station wagon and did not go on buying British!
The Times obituary for Godfrey Smith, future editor of the Sunday Times notes that "His first job after Oxford was as personal assistant to Lord Kemsley, owner of The Sunday Times. In 1956, he was appointed news editor, where he got to know Ian Fleming, who was the foreign manager. When Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale, was published he gave Smith a signed copy. Among his reporters was John Pearson...They were to become lifelong friends, with Pearson always referring to Smith as 'the Guvnor'."
Those of you familiar with Ian Fleming's TV treatment "Murder on Wheels" will know that the plot involves James Bond saving Stirling Moss from agents of SMERSH, who hope to sabotage an auto race. Fleming wrote "The whole brunt of this episode is, of course, borne by the motor racing. Stirling Moss has, in fact, provided me with the two crash manoeuves as described and there is little doubt that he...would co-operate in the filming."
One final note: this thread officially turned a year old on July 3! There are still quite a few articles left to post, though some (like this one) might not have much to do with crime fiction.
As a further guide to would-be buyers at the Motor Show, The Sunday Times invited some of its contributors and staff, as well as some recognised experts, to say what car they would choose and why.
Ian Fleming:
I would choose a Studebaker Avanti, full four-seater V8 Gran Sport, supercharged by Paxton, styled by Raymond Loewy. Price around £3,000.
Having driven two Thunderbirds for six years, during which not a light bulb has fused and paint and chromium have not wilted, despite a garageless life, I have become wedded to American cars when they have something approximating to European styling.
I am now switching to the Studebaker, which has always produced first class cars, and
has now, with the Avanti, created something really startling—top speed with four up of over 160 m.p.h. and acceleration of 0-60 in 7.4 seconds. My model, packed with intelligent gimmicks such as switches in the roof, aircraft-type levers for the heating, disc brakes and a powerful built-in roll bar in case I turn over, is being delivered in a few weeks.
Note: In his 1964 interview with Playboy, Ian Fleming said the following about his cars:
"I like a car I can leave out in the street all night and which will start at once in the morning and still go a hundred miles an hour when you want it to and yet give a fairly comfortable ride. I can’t be bothered with a car that needs tuning, or one that will give me a lot of trouble and expenditure. So I’ve had a Thunderbird for six years, and it’s done me very well. In fact, I have two of them, the good two-seater and the less-good four-seater. I leave them both in the street, and when I get in and press the starter, off they go, which doesn’t happen to a lot of motorcars.
Now, the Studebaker supercharged Avanti is the same thing. It will start as soon as you get out in the morning; it has a very nice, sexy exhaust note and will do well over a hundred and has got really tremendous acceleration and much better, tighter road holding and steering than the Thunderbird. Excellent disk brakes, too. I’ve cut a good deal of time off the run between London and Sandwich in the Avanti, on braking power alone. So I’m very pleased with it for the time being."
By Ian Fleming
Every sport has its own nightmare — the dropped baton, the goal scored against your own side, running out your captain when he has scored ninety-nine; and, in your dreams, they all have the same ghastly background—the packed stands, the serried ranks of spectators, the incredulous hush and then the deep condemnatory groan.
In golf the two-foot putt missed on the eighteenth green is quickly over, and you are at once awake, sweating and whimpering. This terror must be common to even the greatest in the game, but for the week-end golfer, there is a far longer, more horrible nightmare—partnership with a world champion over a course black with the crowds.
Last week-end I endured this nightmare, thirty-six holes of it, and I live, but only just, to tell the tale.
It came about like this. Three weeks ago a friend said he wanted me to play in the Bowmaker Invitation Amateur/Professional Tournament at the Berkshire. “It’s great fun,” he said. “All the best professionals take two amateurs each, and you play a threesome against bogey. Each team puts in three cards—the professional’s for the best scratch score and the professional plus each amateur for the lowest better ball score. The amateur plays off full handicap, and if he makes good use of his strokes he and his pro can get a better ball score around 60. You can pick up when you’ve played too many. They have film stars and such like to amuse the crowds. Come on.”
It sounded fun. I said “Yes,” and forgot about it.
* * *
I forgot about it until I got the draw. I was to play with Peter Thomson, three times Open champion, and Alec Shepperson, handicap plus 1, a Walker Cup probable. I was to be on the first tee of the Red Course at 2.15 last Sunday.
That was Tuesday the eighteenth. On the Wednesday, Peter Thomson, fresh from a fine performance in the American Open, equalled the course record of Sand Moor with a 65 in the Yorkshire Evening News tournament. He followed this with a 67, 64 and 68. He won the tournament by fifteen strokes and broke a handful of records. The golfing world gasped.
Apart from praying that the biggest thunderstorm in living memory would deluge the home counties on the following Sunday and Monday (it was a two-day contest ), there was really nothing I could do about It. I am a nine handicap week-end golfer with a short, flat swing that has been likened to a housemaid sweeping under a bed. It is a fast swing with reserves of fantastic acceleration in moments of stress.
The only reason I am nine is that I obstinately try to play down to it rather than take life more easily off twelve, which I should be. I have never had a golf lesson, except from my grandmother at the age of about fifteen, and my only equipment for the game is a natural “eye” and strong forearms. Against these virtues it should be said that I remember to keep my head down only on one shot in three and that, on occasional shots, “everything moves except the ball.”
The greatest weakness of my essentially immaculate game is that I am quite unable to “repeat” my swing. Even on the putting green, my stance and stroke are at the mercy of the moment’s whim. The fact that I have played golf for some thirty years with occasional success and great pleasure is due to enjoying the company, the exercise and the zest of competition. In short, I am the quintessential amateur.
* * *
The virtues of amateurishness are all right in a friendly game, perhaps sharpened by a gamble, in the privacy of one’s home course. There the quick, sharp dunch into a bunker is a matter for hilarity only mildly tinged with bitterness. But how, I wondered feverishly as the dreadful day approached, would my insouciance stand up playing before vast crowds, with the greatest, or at any rate the second greatest, golfer in the world?
But why worry? It’s only a game. The ball won’t move. Just walk up and hit it. These and other specious exhortations were mouthed at me through wolfish grins by my friends. The worst you can do is maim a few spectators, perhaps even kill one. But the club will be insured. Have a double kümmel before you start. Take an Oblivon.
Steeled by the relish of my friends, I assumed a nonchalant mask. I looked to my equipment. The head of my driver (circa 1930, one of the earliest, surely, of the steel shafts and known around Sandwich as “Excalibur”) was loose. I had it fixed. My double-faced chipper (Tom Morris, 1935), a beloved but temperamental club, was rebound. I bought two pairs of expensive socks in pale blue. I reread the red ink passages in Armour’s How To Play Your Best Golf All The Time, watched Peter Thomson’s unearthly progress through the Yorkshire Evening News tournament and waited queasily for H- (for Horror) Day.
* * *
H-Day dawned bright and clear. No earthquakes. No tornadoes. No thunderstorms. I drove at an even pace to the Berkshire, parked my car among the hundreds, and proceeded to the seventh fairway of the Blue Course, which a number of young gods were bisecting with arrow-straight drives and iron shots using mounds of practice balls.
I retired to an inconspicuous corner with my caddie, six balls and a No.3 iron. It took me about twenty minutes, in my usual ratio of one good shot in three, to lose four of the balls in the woods.
Then came lunch and the unwelcome news that the matches were running over an hour late. I wandered out among the dreadful trappings of my nightmare—the marquees, the huge scoreboard ablaze with the most famous names in professional and amateur golf, and already showing the results of the early starters and, in the background, the loudspeaker giving the position on the near-by 17th tee.
Henry Cotton passed me, his face a mask of concentration, and Locke, majestic, indomitable. Henry Longhurst tossed me a few phrases of gleeful commiseration. And then there were Peter Thomson and Alec Shepperson, and I was explaining who I was and apologising in advance for the dreadful things that they would shortly be witnessing.
* * *
For the first time I felt a ray of comfort. All golfers have their problems. Shepperson was a candidate for the Walker Cup team and he knew the names would be announced the next day and that the selectors were on the course. Thomson knew that every spectator would expect him to go round in level threes. We commiserated with one another over the swelling crowds and in due course there we were standing on the first tee.
The starter's voice rang out — unnecessarily loudly. Thomson drove 250 yards down the centre of the fairway.
“Mr. Iarn Fleming.”
I wiped my hands on the seat of my trousers and stepped forward. Half-conscious, I teed up and gave a practice swing, listening with half my mind for the hiss of astonishment. The crowd was too well bred. I addressed the ball and promptly knocked it off its peg. I put it on again.
Then there was a moment when the world stood still, a brief glimpse of the ball through a mist of tears, a more or less articulated swirl of motion and the blessed ball was well airborne and on its way with a slight draw to come to rest in the rough fifty yards behind Thomson’s.
Shepperson hit a beauty and we were off and away, with the crowd streaming after us. One of my chief tortures, easily foreseen, was that I should always be playing first of the trio. I hacked the ball out of the shallow heather and got it 100 yards on its way down the fairway. Thomson pushed his to the right of the green. Shepperson fluffed with a 4 wood, and there I was having to hit mine again.
***
I had a stroke at all the odd holes. Now it was vital that I should hit the simplest of simple shots 150 yards on to the green. I took out my blaster, with which I thought I would be safest. There was a respectful hush. Head down, you fool! Slow back! BOING!!! The ball, hit off the sole, whizzed along the ground, bumbled up the green and stopped within three yards of the pin.
Muttering something about “Dundee run-up” I strode after it, and, to cut a long story short, both Thomson and Shepperson got fives and all I had to do was to get down in two putts to win a net 4 for Thomson and our better ball. I putted, or rather twitched, the ball a yard past, missing the hole by three inches. Then, with a thumping heart, stroked, or more accurately topped, the ball into the hole amid heartfelt applause from the agonized crowd.
I will pass over the second hole where I hit a No. 7 over the green and picked up and where Thomson got an immaculate 3.
Another stroke at the 3rd. An adequate drive. A fluffed spoon and a smothered 4 iron which again rattled up on the green. Again I somehow got my net 4 to Thomson’s 5. I had “improved” twice for Thomson, but by the foulest means, and there was no question of my golf having settled down.
***
I forget what happened at the 4th, but at the par three 5th, having been advised by Thomson to take a 7 Instead of an 8, I at last hit the ball in the middle of the bat and got a net two, which I followed up with another net two, also well played, at the 7th. Again at the 9th, but this time again by foul means, I scrambled a net four. I had helped Peter Thomson five times in nine holes!
Those treacherous crocodiles my friends, who had come to gloat at my discomfiture, changed their tune. Now they edged up and whispered that my handicap would have to be reduced at Sandwich. I brushed them aside. The sun was shining, the course was beautiful. What fun it was playing with the Open champion!
Alas, while by dunch, scuffle and fluff I somehow played the next nine holes. I was no further help to Peter Thomson and all I can remember of the inward half is the most glorious three I have ever seen, by Shepperson, at the bogey five 15th, and an appalling shank by myself at the 17th. It was with a No. 8, off a downhill lie, and the air positively quivered with the horrible clang as the ball sped at right angles through the spectators’ legs into the deep rough.
And then the round was over, with a 72 for Peter Thomson and net 66s for Alec Shepperson and myself. No earthly good, but at least I hadn’t played Thomson’s ball by mistake, or done an air shot or killed a spectator. It was in a mood of euphoria that I returned to London.
***
Monday was not so good, and I did many terrible things that even now make me shudder, but it had rained very heavily and there were fewer witnesses. Thomson did a 69 and Shepperson, who by this time had been nominated for the Walker Cup, and I, repeated our 66s, which meant that at least I had been able to help Thomson on three holes.
And now the dreadful glory of the occasion is fading and this weekend I shall be playing either a new kind of golf, tempered to the finest steel by its visit to the blast furnace, or, more probably, wilted by the fierce flame.
Alas, when my friends or my grandchildren ask me how Peter Thomson played this shot or Alec Shepperson that, I shall be unable to tell them. I shall have many memories of the two men—of Peter Thomson, justly renowned for a bearing as fine as his golf, and of the modest, charming Shepperson—but of the champion’s golf I shall recall nothing but the immortal words of Leonard Crawley in last Monday’s Daily Telegraph:
“Though Peter Thomson was assisted five times by Ian Fleming, the champion had evidently spent much of his force at Leeds last week.”
By Ian Fleming
Jamaica has now been my second home for eighteen years. Since 1946 I have been coming here, as regularly as clockwork, from January 15 to March 15 and, each year when the time comes to leave, I say my goodbye with a lump in the throat. In this long span of time everything has changed and yet nothing. Jamaica has grown from a child into an adult, she has flirted with Federation and then broken off the engagement, she has gained her Independence and Membership of the United Nations, bauxite and tourism have changed her economy, emigration to the United Kingdom, with all its problems, brings around £7,000,000 back into the island every year, the West Indian cricketers have become the darlings of the Commonwealth and a Jamaican girl has been chosen Miss World.
But the Doctor’s Wind continues to blow in from the sea during the day and the Undertaker’s Wind blows the stale air out again at night, and the news in The Daily Gleaner, the "Country Newsbits", is just the same. A family at Maggotty has been wiped out by "vomiting sickness" (the paper still will not add the medical diagnosis of "eating unripe ackee"), — and Cornelius Brown has "mashed" Agatha Brown with his cutlass and has been sentenced to prison and twelve strokes of the tamarind switch. And the people are just the same, always laughing and bawling each other out, singing the old banana songs as they load the fruit into the ships, getting drunk on rum when the ship has sailed, sneaking an illicit whiff of ganja, or an equally illicit visit to the obeahman when they are ill or in trouble, driving motor cars like lunatics, behaving like zanies at the cricket matches and the races, making the night hideous with the "Sound System" on pay night, and all the while moving gracefully and lazily through the day and fearing the "rolling calf" at night.
And yet, against this background of "plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose" my own life has been turned upside down at, or perhaps even by, the small house named ‘Goldeneye’ I built eighteen years ago on the north shore, and by my life in Jamaica. In 1952, I got married here, in the Registry Office in my neighbouring Port Maria. Noel Coward and his secretary Cole Leslie were the witnesses and Noel tied the shoe on to the back of his own car by mistake.
Encouraged by marriage, or as an antidote to this dangerous transmogrification after forty-three years of bachelorhood, I sat down at the red bullet-wood desk where I am now typing this, and, for better or for worse, wrote the first of twelve best-selling thrillers that have sold around twenty million copies and been translated into twenty-three languages. I wrote every one of them at this desk with the jalousies closed around me so that I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside until I had completed my daily stint. (I have interrupted my sticky thirteenth to write these words.)
The books feature a man called James Bond. Here is another Jamaican link. I was looking for a name for my hero — nothing like Peregrine Carruthers or "Standfast" Maltravers — and I found it, on the cover of one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic. (Only a couple of weeks ago, I met him, the real James Bond, and Mrs Bond, for the first time. They arrived out of the blue and couldn't have been nicer about my theft of the family name. It helped at the customs, they said!) Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it. Noel Coward has written much of his later music and prose here and other still more famous writers, let alone painters, have been stimulated by Jamaica. I suppose it is the peace and silence and cut-offness from the madding world that urges people to create here. There is certainly enough native talent to support the theory.
And my life has been changed in other ways. I first learned about the bottom of the sea from the reefs around my property and that has added a new dimension to my view of the world. And, a vital postgraduate study, I learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people — two very different lessons I would never have absorbed if my life had continued in its pre-Jamaican metropolitan rut. But, above all, Jamaica has provided a wonderful annual escape from the cold and grime of winters in England, into blazing sunshine, natural beauty and the most healthy life I could wish to live.
My house, Goldeneye, has also lived through many changes. The thirty or so acres in which it stands were a barren donkey’s racecourse when I built it. Now the land is a jungle of tall trees and tropical shrubs and we could live on my citrus and coconuts and the fish from the sea. Couples have spent their honeymoons here, stricken friends have regained their health, painters and writers — Cecil Beaton, Truman Capote, Lucian Freud, Graham Greene, Robert Harling, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Rosamund Lehmann, Peter Quennell, Alan Ross, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh — have stayed and worked here, and a British Prime Minister and his wife, Sir Anthony and Lady Eden, were here for three weeks during his convalescence in the winter of 1956, after Suez. (The Jamaican Government turned my little gazebo on the western corner of the property into a direct teleprinter link with Number 10 Downing Street. The police guards cut ‘God Bless Sir Anthony and Lady Eden’ into the bark of my cedar trees. The detective, sleeping in the back room, shot at the bush rats, beloved by my wife, with his revolver, but the two trees, of a species still wrapped in mystery, which the Edens planted, have flourished mightily.)
But this is name-dropping. Why should this modest house, with wooden jalousies and no glass in the windows, with three bedrooms with shower baths and lavatories that often hiss like vipers or ullulate like stricken bloodhounds, with its modest staff of local help, headed by Violet, my incomparable housekeeper for all these years, have attracted all these famous people to its meagre bosom come rain (which can often fall, as it does in all corners of the world) or shine which it always will in my memory? Noel Coward provides a comment. He is given to hyperbole. In 1948, from March 22 to May 31, he stayed at Goldeneye, at, he claims, an exorbitant rent. He wrote in the visitor's book, and foolishly signed them, the following words: "The happiest two months I have ever spent." He then went off and, as close to me as he could get, built a house (what am I saying? four houses) and — to hell with the charms of Bermuda and Switzerland! — comes here every year. But, before he left Goldeneye, he wrote the ode which I now reprint, not for its merit, which is small, but purely to fill up space.
NOEL COWARD MEMORIAL ODE
Alas! I cannot adequately praise
The dignity, the virtue and the grace
Of this most virile and imposing place
Wherein I passed so many airless days.
Alas! Were I to write ’till crack of doom
No typewriter, no pencil, nib, nor quill
Could ever recapitulate the chill
And arid vastness of the living-room.
Alas! I cannot accurately find
Words to express the hardness of the seat
Which, when I cheerfully sat down to eat
Seared with such cunning into my behind.
Alas! However much I raved and roared
No rhetoric, no witty diatribe
Could ever, even partially, describe
The impact of the spare-room bed — and board.
Alas! I am not someone who exclaims
With rapture over ancient equine prints.
Ah no, dear Ian, I can only wince
At all those horses framed in all those frames.
Alas! My sensitivity rebels,
Not at loose shutters; not at plagues of ants,
Nor other "sub-let" bludgeonings of chance
But, at those hordes of ageing faded shells.
Alas! If only common-sense could teach
The stubborn heart to heed the crafty brain
You would, before you let your house again
Remove the barracudas from the beach.
But still my dear Commander, I admit,
No matter how I criticize and grouse,
That I was strangely happy in your house
In fact I’m very very fond of it.
Signed "Noel", February 1949
(Note that it took the man nine months to dream up this insulting doggerel!)
Well, I am still devoted to the monster (misprint for "Master") and the rivalry between our houses (he refers to mine as "Goldeneye, Nose and Throat") has continued all these fifteen years (he wanted to build a swimming bath — his beach is lousy — and asked his "attorney" what strength of pump he would need to keep the water clean. The attorney replied "Hit depend, Mister Cowhard, how much soap you use"). But the point is clear. It is not the rude comforts of my house that appeal nor, I think, entirely my wife, who is as honey to a hummingbird. It is the friendly embrace of Jamaica and of the Jamaican way of life, and the fact, as the advertisements put it, that Jamaica is no place like home. To illustrate what the country is made of and what it has to offer, and as an hors d’oeuvre to the more nourishing fare that follows, I will reprint here my very first impressions of Jamaica, a mood piece which I wrote for Cyril Connolly’s famous Horizon magazine in December, 1947, and specifically for the lively series, entitled "Where Shall John Go?" which was aimed at readers who wished to flee the drabness of postwar Britain. I have made a very few alterations in the light of my experience of Jamaica since it was first written. But these few alterations are only of facts; the mood remains unaltered.
[Article omitted for reason of length and because it is already online]
Well, there you are — the great part of the first article I ever wrote, the writing of which perhaps gave me confidence one day to write a book. There is little that I would alter today. Many facts have dated. The mosquitoes have been almost entirely eradicated, the political background has changed, although those perennial duellists, Sir Alexander Bustamente and Mr Norman Manley, are still at it, and the University has been built, but I would alter nothing of the "mood" of the piece except to add the caveat that some of the many new hotels charge exorbitantly and that shrimp cocktails and steak have followed the almighty dollar into the island.
To write any more would be only to repeat myself and to hold you from the wonderful team of Jamaican writers whom my friend Morris Cargill has assembled to make this the first comprehensive book ever to have been written on Jamaica.
Ian Fleming
Goldeneye
February 1964
As you can see from the date, this one of Fleming's last writings--probably his second to last. For greater context, make sure to read the invaluable Goldeneye. Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica, by Matthew Parker.
By Ian Fleming
Some Caen. Some Caen’t.
No harm in starting off with a really bad joke. Master, or rather Past-master Caen has several times exercised his lamentable sense of humor at my and James Bond’s expense and I am glad of this opportunity to strike back.
But a valid truism lies behind the execrable pun. To the uninitiated, it looks easy enough to be a columnist. What could be more simple than to sit down at the typewriter and ramble on about the passing scene—the human comedy?
After all, Boswell was no genius. He just wrote down what he saw and what he thought—commonplace stuff. He was no Shakespeare, no Shelley—a competent reporter with ink in his veins.
Ah, but that's the point! You must have ink in your veins. You really must love writing and communicating in order to sit down and write around 1000 words a day in such a fashion that people will read them. And that is what a daily columnist has to do.
Every day, come hangover, come flu, come lack of inspiration, come ailing wife or bawling children, he must go confidently and with seeming omniscience on stage and show himself to the public in naked black and white.
No excuses! You are a columnist, and by God you’ve got to fill your column to the satisfaction of your readers and, though this may be rare, to your own.
I know these things because I once wrote a column myself. I did it for three years and chucked it about five years ago when James Bond came to my rescue.
I was Foreign Manager of the Sunday Times (the real one. Not yours!) and I thought that its gossip column, which went, and still goes, by the pompous name of “Atticus,” was so bad that I would have a bash at it in between coping with the future of the world and the marital tangles of my foreign correspondents.
I renamed the column “People and Things” by Atticus, because I am interested in Things, and got into business. It went down all right, though I received more kicks than ha’pence from an editor whose sense of humor differed from mine, and the from readers who appeared only interested in writing in when I made a mistake, and to this day I am proud of two paragraphs of undying merit from that long stint.
The first, through a careful study of the psychology of the drinking American, correctly forecast the winning Miss Rheingold for that year (You see how right the editor was. Perhaps .007 per cent of Sunday Times readers had even heard of Rheingold beer).
The second, revealing the existence of a Grimsby troglodyte who smoked kippers as they should be smoked, brought in 4,700 letters (A record for the paper) and incidentally made a fortune for the old man.
Is there a common denominator between my modest achievement and Herb
Caen’s majestic record? What’s all this about Fleming anyway? We want to hear about Herb. Patience! Pazienza! Geduld!
Yes, there is a common denominator. Every columnist, and Herb Caen is a shining example, must be interested in everything, even in those matters which are outside his readers’ ken, and he must communicate his enthusiasms to the reader, and secondly, he must have some vague social purpose—a desire to help and instruct his readers and if possible right an occasional wrong (rescue the kipper merchant for instance).
But above all, whether exposing a peccant mayor or police chief (a favorite sport in the United States, I believe) or just writing about the smog, he must at all costs avoid being a bore.
For half a generation, and from the evidence of this anniversary accolade, Herb Caen, writing for perhaps the most wide-awake community in the United States, somehow has managed, day in, day out, to avoid being a bore. For what it is worth, we have not, in Great Britain, got one journalist with anything like the same record.
And, in conclusion, I will tell you something else which is even more to his credit, and something which may be news to you. Some time ago, amongst my cuttings (clippings), I received a column by Herb Caen which affectionately but devastatingly sent up James Bond, pulling the author's leg almost out of its socket.
A saboteur in the pay of SMERSH, I surmised, and tucked the author's name away in my “unfinished business” file.
When next in New York, I asked one of the hamlet’s most famous editors about this fellow Caen.
“He's one of America’s greatest columnists,” he said. “We’d all like to get him. Trouble is, nothing on earth will drag him away from San Francisco.”
Well, feed your captive well. He’s good for another 25 years at the coal face.
Notes: Caen actually spent 34 more years at the coal face, before his death in 1997. He was one of Fleming's early American fans and helped popularize the books in his column from January 28, 1962, titled "The Thin Cruel Smile."
After this article, Caen and Fleming met in London. Their lunch was immortalized in Caen's May 16, 1963 column "Conversation at Scott's." Excerpts below:
Caen later devoted a column to Fleming's death. In "Farewell to Double Nought Seven" (August 16, 1964), he wrote:
Caen also wrote about the San Francisco world premiere of A View to a Kill, which he hated:
And “Don't they have any sense of fun?” is going to be my response to any future criticism of Bond that occurs within earshot.