JAMES BOND AND I GO THROUGH THE STRATOSPHERE: SUB-TEXT: BIPOLAR DISORDER

Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, went through the financial stratosphere in 1962 when the film adaptations of his fictional spy began appearing. I began my travelling-pioneering life with the Canadian Baha’i community in ’62 and did not see a Bond film until 1967. The books of Ian Fleming had gradually become famous as they had been appearing since 1953, the year that the Baha’i community completed the temple in Chicago.

Ian Fleming was a restless, cynical English newspaperman who began publishing his Bond books with Casino Royale and with the words: “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” Fewer than five thousand copies of that book were initially printed, but sales rose with each book. Bond slowly entered the national consciousness, and his adventures began to travel, notably to America.(1)

Half a dozen more books were to come before Fleming died in August 1964, and there was a handy endorsement when John Kennedy revealed his enthusiasm for 007. I was just about to start my honours history and philosophy course at McMaster university and a part time job with the T. Eaton Company in their cash register clearance section when Fleming died. I was the only Baha’i on campus in my university years: 1963-1966 and readers can examine my autobiography should they be interested in my life from 1943 to the present.

The tumult of my bipolar disorder kept my emotions in a confused state and I never even heard of the books of Ian Fleming back then. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Bondage, The New York Review of Books, 14 August 2008.

A long and distinguished line of adult
spy fiction books runs from Conrad’s
The Secret Agent by way of Somerset
Maugham’s Ashenden books to Greene,
Eric Ambler, Nigel Dennis, John Le Carré,
and Robert Harris, with those Americans
Alan Furst and Joseph Kanon latterly……
carrying on the tradition.(1) But, I must
confess to not being interested in spy
fiction of any kind……Fleming drank a
bottle of gin a day & smoked so many
cigarettes that he died at only fifty-six.

His story grew still more melancholy &
his only son who had an acute bipolar
disorder took his life with an overdose
of drugs and, as a sufferer from bipolar
disorder myself, I can tell you that drugs
& manic-depression do not mix especially
with all that money to support your habit.

1 Wheatcroft, op.cit.

Ron Price
14 November 2011