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I'm not convinced either. Here's a letter Fleming sent to his American literary agent Naomi Burton in May 1955, which was reprinted in Chapter 19 of Pearson's biography:
Chandler's copy of LALD came directly from Fleming, so it was the British version. And the conversation alluded to was cut from the American edition published in April 1955. While Burton didn't succeed in pressuring Fleming to cut the passage, Fleming's American editor Al Hart did. In any case, the letter makes clear that Fleming was proud of the scene--and based on this letter he would not have preferred this particular edit to the original British version.
If Fleming preferred the American edits, why didn't he incorporate them into the British versions or their reprints? He had many opportunities to do so, especially after the books became best-sellers.
It’s clear that Fleming was eager to break into the American market and agreed to any edits suggested by American editors. That’s why the first American paperback edition of Casino Royale was retitled You Asked For It, and Moonraker was christened Too Hot to Handle. Fleming approved of those changes too. Does anyone regard them as definitive?
To further the case of the prosecution, notice Vintage’s statement about the American and British text incorporating "one minor factual correction (regarding the manufacturer of a brand of perfume)." This refers to a line from chapter 11 that now reads: "Solitaire called for him. The room smelled of Balmain's Vent Vert."
Fleming originally wrote "Dior's Vent Vert" and was embarrassed by this error, as a letter demonstrates: "Alas, attributing Vent Vert to Dior was nearly as bad as when, in one of my books, I made Bond eat asparagus with sauce bearnaise instead of mousseline."
So this correction to Live and Let Die was definitely requested by Fleming, and it raises the question--if Fleming requested this change to the British edition, why didn't he request all the other edits from the American version too, if he supposedly preferred them? Given the opportunity to make all those edits, Fleming only chose to correct his perfume mistake!
In America the censored text of LALD was the only available one until the Penguin editions arrived in the early 2000s. It’s become the dominant text, so Vintage’s retroactive censorship made even less sense. What Vintage created was certainly not a “definitive edition.” It took advantage of edits Fleming accepted in one foreign market to bowdlerize the novel and cooked up a spurious justification for doing so.
The 2023 editions are up to the same game. Removing offensive material from Fleming is like closing the barn door 60 years after the horse left. First-time readers will get a distorted version of the books--and they'll likely feel betrayed after learning they'd read a censored version that gave a dishonestly innocuous version of Fleming's racial attitudes.
It's pointless to censor the books and pretend they don't have racist passages. Who's going to be fooled by this, when the original texts have been circulating for more than 60 years and will continue to do so in used bookshops and online? Anyone who comes away from the new editions thinking the Bond books don't have offensive passages will quickly be disabused by reality (and a quick look at the internet). The project is incredibly patronizing to any intelligent reader.
I think this has been done already. But then the Bible has always been edited to suit political interests (mostly those of the then ruling classes), before and after canonization. This is just the latest twist.
Also James Bond fans: How dare you remove the racism from these books?!?!
The best way to attract younger Bond fans is to make Bond movies that appeal to younger people, who will read the books. Already being Bond fans, they will disregard the badly dated passages and enjoy the rest.
Tarantinos’ films and other works such as The Godfather clearly serve as reminders of racist tendencies in certain demographics/historic periods but never glorifies nor normalises these opinions in heroic characters, certainly not nationally and internationally acclaimed ones.
Or, I could just act like an adult and enjoy it for what it is.
@Revelator has said it best. Great, insightful post, this. Thank you, sir. I especially agree with the final sentence.
While I get the logic behind these posts, I also things like this on social media.
https://hexiva.tumblr.com/post/639873292334956544/i-have-now-read-every-single-one-of-ian-flemings
And that opening line alone: I have now read every single one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, except for Live and Let Die, which I had to stop once I hit the chapter title which includes the N-word..."
Like it or not (and I suspect it's going to be a "not" for a lot of folks), this is how these books are going to be seen. We complain that film Bond has overtaken the literary Bond, but then we get mad when something like the above becomes the expressed view of a new generation of fans coming into the novels. There are plenty of first time Bond readers for whom seeing this kind of thing can, will, and always shall be, a deal breaker. If literary Bond is going to have a future, particularly a mass market future that it's clear IFP is pursuing, this is something we've got to face. Whether that's for better or worse is another matter, I'll admit, but you can't say literary Bond needs a bigger audience and then get mad about a step that could very well contribute to that, IMHO.
Why should we presume the reaction of a silly person on Tumblr is representative of the mass readership? And why should we presume that person would have happily read LALD if it was censored, though they knew it was a doctored version of a racist book?
How will censoring the books change that perception? By fooling readers into thinking the Bond books don't have offensive passages? The internet has made that sort of con game impossible to sustain.
And I bet there are even more first time Bond readers capable of understanding that the books were written long ago and don't conform to modern attitudes. Why patronize the audience? The sort of weak-minded reader who can't read a book because it has an offensive racial epithet isn't the sort worth pursuing and I doubt they're indicative of anything beyond the fact that Tumblr and Twitter aren't reality.
I doubt that. The outcry over the censorship of Roald Dahl's books has already made the publishers walk back their efforts. And a book like Huckleberry Finn is in no danger of dying out and has yet to be replaced by a censored version, despite the best efforts of various censors. What we have to face is that the offensive passages of the Bond books can't be swept under the rug, no matter what IFP thinks.
Partly because this isn't the first time this conversation has come up. And it isn't just one person on Tumblr as a simple Google search brought up multiple (here and here for but two examples with the former also touching upon the film version) hits for people asking this question elsewhere. And the answers they got were mixed and, with this conversation, seem down to generational lines.
I will say, too, that being in my early 30s and working at a bookstore with a younger generation plays into my thoughts as well. Indeed, conversations about Bond have led to comments about the early films attitudes in the present day. Like it or not, they are a lot more aware about things and yes that does effect what media they partake in.
Like with the Dahl controversy, things don't happen in a vacuum. As a writer myself, it's hard not to be aware that sensitivity readers are a thing now and readers (especially younger ones) are becoming more vocal about raising objections. You can see that as a way to "patronize the audience" full of "weak-minded reader who can't read a book because it has an offensive racial epithet," but it's become a fact of life in publishing. And that effects back catalog titles, too.
Whether that's "censorship" or not is a matter of debate and a point between whether books are "fixed works" or not. And if Fleming hadn't signed off on a version of Live and Let Die with some of these issues all ready expressed and dealt with, I'd be a lot more exercised about it. Personally, I don't think that's censorship so much as estates and publishers (which has become one and the same in the case of IFP) trying to future proof their works. Is it censorship that Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is published under that title and not either of two previous ones using racial epithets it had been previously? That's without mentioning the likes of, say, Jules Verne whose English language translation changed details (including politically sensitive things or, in some later works, things that would be considered racist even at the time) but no one seems particularly exercised about that. Or Ray Bradbury having a story removed from later editions of The Martian Chronicles because, as well intentioned as it was, its racial politics did more harm than good. Times change and works do, too.
I find the mention of Huckleberry Finn ironic because, twenty years in an Alabama middle school, my class did read a "censored" edition. And, frankly, having had the original to compare with eventually, I'm not sure it made a bit of difference. Did changing racial epithets in Huckleberry Finn lessen the work or make it more accessible (and acceptable)? I know where I stand on that issue and I wouldn't claim to be a massive fan of Mark Twain. And given that book was banned as recently as last year, it suggests that we're going to be having the same debates about Fleming, Dahl, Raymond Chandler, and insert any author of yesteryear for a long time to come.
Ultimately, for me, that's the question here: Do we treat these books as museum pieces, preserved warts and all, or do we try to make them accessible for future generations?
As you note, one of the examples relates to the film. Do you advocate re-editing that to be less offensive as well? As for the second example, would putting out a censored edition of LALD have made that person change their mind about the book's racism? Or would they instead have alerted everyone to the fact that the original novel is racist and what folks have been reading is a bowdlerziation? That's surely what will happen if the censored versions start circulating. Moreover, in neither of these cases did someone refrain from actually watching or reading the work in question because it was racist. There's no evidence that Fleming would have far more readers if censored editions were available.
It's a fashion, one that many readers and critics are pushing back on. The fact that Dahl's publishers are backtracking shows that concerned readers do not have to lie down and accept whatever's trendy among publishers.
What about all the changes that are being made to the other novels at the suggestions of the sensitivity readers? And as noted upthread, Fleming also signed off on allowing the American paperbacks of CR and MR to be retitled for the American market, and just as with the LALD edits, those changes were localized for one foreign market and clearly did not represent the author's preferred text.
It's less about the future and more about corporations playing it safe by adhering to a trend. It's corporate self-censorship, not publishers consulting a crystal ball.
Yes, it is--and it's also one of those extreme and rare cases where allowing the original title would have created major problems in selling or even mentioning the book, problems far more major than any involved with Fleming. There are exceptions to every rule, and this is a case where changing the title was neccesary to keep the book on the stands, even if it was a form of self-censorship on the publisher's part.
Not 100 years ago perhaps, but nowadays many recent translations of Verne proudly proclaim that they're uncensored and translate Verne's original text. This goes with many other translations superseding those from the 19th century, because many modern readers dislike the idea of reading a book that doesn't represent what the author wrote. Given a choice between the censored and non-censored versions of a non-children's book, how many readers would go for the former?
And 20 years ago in a California school I read the original. My guess is that most schools still offer the original, which allows us to see how casually racist terms were thrown around in Twain's day, even by folks like Twain who were not truly racist. It's a point worth making.
A work of art is not a car, which has new models are brought out each year to appeal to new customers. Making works "accessible to future generations" would be the perfect rationale to colorize every black and white movie, re-paint any painting that isn't modern-looking, or rewrite any novel published more than several decades ago. At what point does we start respecting the artist's work, instead of presuming that we have the freedom to hack around with it because we're up to date and supposedly know better? The most successful work of arts have managed to appeal to us across the long space of time and changes in culture. They didn't need training wheels added by officious censors and sensitivity readers.
Fleming's work will remain notorious for its offensive passages, and offering bowdlerized editions won't change that or improve the reputation of the books. Offering readers a way to contextualize those passages might, and would be far more constructive. But the public won't be fooled by IFP deciding to pretend the bad bits never existed.
But in the same time I'm not sure or the contrary, the world is so that we see peoples (young ? old ?) asking more censor or privation of their own liberties, so I can't be of anything...
Octopussy (Short Story) is also included.
And anyone that goes on social media and says they won't read a book with "the N-word" in is just virtue signalling.
It does seem though, that the current world isn't the place for books aimed at 'red blooded males on trains and planes' (or whatever the quote was).
The world of Fleming's Bond is not our world; it's not even the world of GF (the movie). I had to learn this the hard way when I read my first Fleming, and that was in the mid '90s when I was a teenager. So you have to read these books in a time capsule, and if you can't, then these books won't be making much sense to you. Well, language is a big part of that. Shakespeare, Wells, Lovecraft, Doyle, Poe ... all wrote in a language that we no longer use. A little effort is required if you want to read and enjoy their stories. And it's not just the words or grammar; it's also how they describe things, and, most importantly, how people talked back then. Ergo, when Fleming has people talking in, granted, my least favourite chapter of LALD (when Bond visits the bar--it's just a fairly useless chapter, is why), I assume he took slang and street talk from reality. Why should he have cleaned that up? I've seen enough '70s blaxploitation films to assume that he wasn't too far off.
So taking a dive into '50s America as described by an author in the '50s, comes with a bit of homework for someone young enough not to have witnessed 9/11. And it's the full package, including his language. It can be different (not that it has to be, but it can be) if a book about '50s America were written today. Trying to cater to youngsters by cleaning up the words so as not to upset them, while they will be forced to abandon their impressions of the world today (their world) anyway, seems a bit silly.
Besides, I think we sometimes overestimate their alleged sensitivities. Plenty of 16-year olds whose tongues are as twisted as the devil himself. I happen to spend a lot of time in this crowd professionally, and I can safely say that most of them can handle pretty much anything they hear, including the N-word. They may be principled, but they're not as easily upset or offended as we are sometimes led to think.
Perhaps that's why I'm not all that bothered by the news beyond the surface level annoyance of it. Bond has always had that generational tradition edge over most other media series.
Of course, there are many fans out there who found their Bond love all on their own - and those who will do so in future are probably the ones who will be impacted the most by it.
https://www.express.co.uk/showbiz/tv-radio/1739861/Jeffery-Archer-James-Bond-woke-editing
‘I was a sensitivity reader – until I realised why I was hired’
"Sensitivity readers are accused of manipulating authors’ words, but the truth is murkier; with trauma being mined for profit "
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/0/confessions-sensitivity-reader-had-no-power-sanitise-books/
Chances are you’d never heard of a sensitivity reader until the furore over the editing of Roald Dahl’s work that was exposed on Friday. I certainly wasn’t aware of the term when I secured a job as an editorial assistant with a top-five publisher in early 2017, aged 25. My role involved a lot of mundane administrative tasks, but I was thrilled to be there. I was also allowed to read early drafts of manuscripts and offer feedback, something I enjoyed.
I’d been in the role for a few months when my boss, one of the editors, called a meeting and asked if I would be interested in joining a new team of eight people that worked on something called sensitivity reading. I think the team was formed as my publisher had some issues with works that had been published in America and accusations of cultural appropriation.
They thought of me for the role because of notes I’d recently offered on a manuscript for what would go on to be a widely successful bestselling debut by a Scottish author. I didn’t know when I wrote that review but it was a test. My boss – a middle-class woman in her 40s – explained that we would be a team of beta readers, offering authors pointers on aspects of their work that might be outside their knowledge. For example, was the portrayal of a black protagonist culturally appropriate when a white author had written it?
As a straight, white woman, I didn’t think I had much to offer, but my boss explained we could draw on personal experiences. She cited me being working class (a perspective often lacking in publishing) and my previous alcohol issues, which I was open about, as qualities that made me right for the role. Then she asked if there was any history of mental illness or abuse in my past. I was caught unaware. Keen to please, I offered details of my experiences with domestic violence and mental health issues while she nodded and took notes.
It was very casual; at the time I was flattered to be asked to join a new team and considered it a step up for my career. I worked on adult fiction, but others in the team specialised in books for children and young adults. We were involved in the process very early on and, contrary to popular opinion, we didn’t have the power to make drastic changes – all we could do was offer feedback. And sometimes that feedback was ignored. After we had worked on a manuscript it would go through at least three more edits. I found the work rewarding. One day, I wanted to be an editor and working on a text with writers felt like a good place to start.
The team of sensitivity readers were all under 30 – there was even someone who had started as an editorial assistant who was still in her late teens. When I met the rest of the team, I realised we had all been recruited because we had some form of trauma. Whether it be abuse, addiction, or issues around sexuality or race, we were all somehow drawing from our previous suffering. One had a history of self-harm. In hindsight, it felt like manipulation of young impressionable employees, who were being paid less than £20,000 a year to effectively reopen old wounds and safeguard the reputation of the publisher.
Since I started working as a sensitivity reader, they have become vital to publishing – almost every book goes through a sensitivity reader now; and everyone on the team is anticipating how a book will be read five, 10 or 15 years in the future.
Much of the role of the sensitivity reader is to pick up on unconscious bias. Fiction is fiction – it’s supposed to be make-believe – but sometimes you’ll read something and think, “that person has no clue. They haven’t done their research and they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
For example, one of the first novels I read was written by a privately educated man who wrote his working-class characters as semi-literate yobs. In contrast, his middle-class characters were articulate and erudite. He was not receptive to my feedback and sent lengthy, angry emails, telling me I was stupid and inexperienced because he refused to believe he was perpetuating class stereotypes.
Sometimes I picked up on aspects of a novel that seemed beyond the realms of fiction, such as an instance of rape in a book which saw the perpetrator convicted of sexual assault with relative ease. This was written by someone with minimal experience in the criminal justice system, where sexual assault conviction rates are woefully low.
After a year, I left my publishing job to freelance when family issues meant I had to leave London and return home to Scotland. I was able to charge up to £500 a manuscript for sensitivity reading as a freelancer and took on clients in the US, where the practice is more widespread. Eventually, though, the role’s “trauma for hire” aspect became detrimental to my mental health, and I gave up freelance sensitivity reading after 18 months to pursue a journalism career. I wouldn’t go back to working in publishing after my experience.
Sensitivity readers are painted as people who are out to sanitise the work of authors. The truth is, I didn’t have that power. In my experience, they are often lowly publishing employees with hardly any power who want to make the books they read more believable and respectful. Our contribution felt important and I like to think we were doing a good job.
It did feel really important, what we were doing. It’s only in hindsight that I looked back and realised that our trauma was exploited for commercial gain.
Things like this make it painfully clear we’re moving in the wrong direction. As a writer and reader I’m absolutely horrified at the prospect of how much fiction will be policed moving forward. I can only hope people come to their senses and not let artistry be choked out by a tight leash like this.
On the other hand I can't say I'm surprised a company wants to cover its ass and not give any misguided individuals an easy attack, however immature the entire affair is. You can buy the entire Bond collection used on the right thrift sites for $5 each and most will fit in your pocket!
The Bible has of course been edited innumerable times. It's still the Bible. (And THAT, I presume, is precisely @FoxRox's point...)
I'm not in favor of editing LALD any more than has already been the case -- as a US reader I have of course read the US version -- but there must be a zillion copies of this novel in used book stores all over the world. I doubt there is any danger of "Fleming's original intent" being substantially lost, regardless of whatever actions the current caretakers of the Bond literary canon may take.
I just want to see a print version of the novel that includes Sheriff J.D. Pepper... ~X(
...and then the good Sheriff can be added to the updated version of The Man With the Golden Gun. b-(
Good point. Fleming wrote plenty of disparaging remarks about European ethnicities like Irishmen, Germans, Russians, and Bulgarians. Will those be removed as well?
Honey Ryder is now Must Love Spiders
Tiffany Case is now Must Love Diamonds
etc.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/5WQguUhw_7A
https://www.ianfleming.com/statement-new-editions/?fbclid=IwAR3j-CLDopAE9TPRmV3a8zxSJS0w3GQC0ihHBH_O4npI0xjNINwtzkjp49Y
In any case, Andrew Lycett has weighed in too:
I’m Ian Fleming’s biographer – there’s no way James Bond can be made ‘PC’ (The Independent, Feb. 27, 2023)
I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of attitudes at a particular moment in time
By Andrew Lycett
Ian Fleming’s books have now followed Roald Dahl’s and been pruned of potentially offensive references on the advice of a new tribe of sensitivity readers.
But it’s never a good look to change what an author originally wrote. It smacks of censorship, and there’s seldom much mileage in that.
Of course, there are words and phrases in the Bond novels which look out of place today. References to race, as in the ethnicity of the barman in Thunderball, have reportedly been removed from a new edition of the 007 oeuvre, along with the description of a striptease in Live and Let Die.
However, I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s – and society’s – attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming.
The only changes to the text should come from the author. So Fleming himself allowed the title of a chapter heading in Live and Let Die, published in 1954, to be altered in subsequent editions because it used an offensive racial stereotype.
But there's no way Bond's character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.
Posthumous “continuation novels” like the later Bond novels written by Anthony Horowitz can initiate changes if required, though the secret agent’s behaviour in these is surprisingly familiar – except that he no longer smokes like a chimney or drinks quite as much.
Films have more licence in this regard. Consequently EON, the producers of the James Bond movies, have tried to make the central character more sensitive – and even a family man – in the latest instalment of the franchise No Time to Die, which appeared in 2021. But often in the past, when they have attempted any softening of the character, they have returned to the original hard man of Fleming’s books.
I have some perspective on this since, as well as writing a biography of Fleming, I have also written one on Rudyard Kipling, the Anglo-Indian author who kick-started his career with Plain Tales from the Hills, a collection of witty short stories about the Raj.
As a young journalist in India in the later 19th century, Kipling admired the British administration, became a committed imperialist, and thereafter turned his back on any expression of Indian political self-determination.
But while several of his attitudes would be dismissed today, his work – with all its felicities and imperfections – should be left untouched, as it vividly represents how society operated during his lifetime. As a result, his output has found new favour in modern India, not least as a historical source which is studied for its vivid description of the late colonial period.
Similarly, Fleming can be read – along with his contemporary Kingsley Amis – for his sophisticated journalist’s take on the mindless materialism of a society emerging blinking into the world after the deprivations of war, eager for new experiences which include foreign travel and sensual pleasure.
He stated uncompromisingly that his books were “written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railways trains, aeroplanes and beds”. In other words, he was writing for adults on the move in a modern society.
The Roald Dahl stories which recently publicised this issue are aimed almost exclusively at children. While young minds should not be exposed to unnecessary cruelty, characters such as the tyrannical Miss Trunchbull in Dahl’s Matilda have emerged unscathed. Children enjoy the frisson which comes from a sense of naughtiness. Otherwise, the pantomime Punch and Judy would not exist.
It is possible to preface such books with a warning of potentially offensive material and leave it to a reader, or a parent, to decide how to proceed. Inevitably it’s the big names, such as Dahl and Fleming, which are mainly affected.
There is a reason for this, and its name is business. Their popularity means that they are more likely to be filmed or turned into comics, video games, or any other media which copyright holders are drawn to in the promotion of a “franchise”.
Andrew Lycett is the author of ‘Ian Fleming’ and ‘Rudyard Kipling’, both published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Octo-WHAT?!?!?!!!