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HRF Keating On The James Bond Novels

What position Ian Fleming holds in the world of spy thrillers...

Keating can bite me...

It is true, Fleming did write to make money and hopefully to get his books made into films.

He admitted that himself before his untimely death.

However, Fleming was an imaginative writer and one that should never be put off as simply irrelevant or unpretentious. His work may have been juvenile in nature, but his subliminal sub-text is pure art.

But it is usually after the artist leaves us for the after-life that his work is consider of any value.

Nice article once again, SILHOUETTEMAN. I'm enjoying these literary forays.

'Low pole' is a low blow, perhaps, but Keating was speaking in an interview, so he couldn't edit his comments, and it was a programme about Len Deighton, who hasn't had nearly the praise he should have had. Best-sellers, yes, but his reputation has faded and it's now Le Carre who people reference, because he's still writing. But I think Keating is right about Deighton - he's up there with Ambler and Greene, and his books deserve to be read as novels in their own right, quite apart from the fact that they deal with spies.

There may well have been an element of false modesty in Fleming's claim to be writing just for money - but I think quite a lot of truth, too. He found it hard-going and didn't like rewriting - if he spotted major structural errors he left them. He relied on the main thrust of his ideas, the appeal of his main character, the fluidity of his prose and the particular tone his imagination created from intriguing facts he'd ferreted out. And it worked very well. But most of his novels do have thin patches, plot problems, weak characterisation or some other obvious flaw: most of Deighton's don't. Fleming's are perhaps more fun, though, and perhaps the above are not the signs of Great Art or the reasons why work lasts.

It's interesting how many writers and critics had love/hate relationships with Fleming. I think your quote from Gardner's website is rather revealing - you've used it to show a level of hypocrisy or perhaps to be fairer a changed opinion in Keating regarding Fleming, but what about Gardner himself? He didn't much like Fleming's work or the character of Bond - but he still took the job! Why would the man used as the go-between necessarily have been the world's biggest Fleming fan, then? Publishing's a business, after all. Finally, I'm not sure we all have such fixed and consistent views that we would be happy for them to be investigated as a front-page story on CBn. Most of us could pop back into our own posting history and find statements we made that we now disagree with quite strongly.



Incidentally, your quote from Amis about how Fleming should tell interviewers that the lot of 007 'allegorized the lot of Western man' reminded me of the following scene in Deighton's AN EXPENSIVE PLACE TO DIE, published in 1967, two years after THE JAMES BOND DOSSIER. I wonder if the English writer 'exlpaining James Bond' is meant to be Amis! The scene takes place in a Parisian nightclub called Les Chiens, and the narrator is a British secret agent.

'On a staircase, a wedge of people were embracing, laughing like advertising photos. At the bar, a couple of English photographers were talking in cockney and an English writer was explaining James Bond.

A waiter put four glasses full of ice cubes and a half-bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table before us. 'What's this?' I asked.

The waiter turned away without answering. Two Frenchmen at the bar began to argue with the English writer and a bar stool fell over. The noise wasn't loud enough for anyone to notice. On the dance floor a girl in a shiny plastic suit was swearing at a man who had burned a hole in it with his cigarette. I heard the English writer behind me say, 'But I have always immensely adored violence. His violence is his humanity. Unless you understand that you understand nothing.' He wrinkled his nose and smiled. One of the Frenchmen replied, 'He suffers in translation.' The photographer was clicking his fingers in time to the music. 'Don't we all?' said the English writer, and looked around.

Byrd said, 'Shocking noise.'

'Don't listen,' I said.

'What?' said Byrd.

The English writer was saying '...a violent Everyman in a violent but humdrum...' he paused, 'but humdrum world.' He nodded agreement to himself. 'Let me remind you of Baudelaire. There's a sonnet that begins...'

'So this bird wants to get out of the car...' one of the photographers was saying.

'Speak a little more quietly,' said the English writer. 'I'm going to recite a sonnet.'

'Belt up,' said the photographer over his shoulder. 'This bird wanted to get out of the car...'

'Baudelaire,' said the writer. 'Violent, macabre and symbolic.'

'You leave bollicks out of this,' said the photographer, and his friend laughed. The writer put a hand on his shoulder and said, 'Look my friend...' The photographer planted a right jab into his solar plexus without spilling the drink he was holding. The writer folded up like a deckchair and hit the floor. A waiter grabbed towards the photographer, but stumbled over the English writer's inert body.

'Look here,' said Byrd, and a passing waiter turned so that the half-bottle of whisky and the four glasses of ice were knocked over. Someone aimed a blow at the photographer's head. Byrd got to his feet saying quietly and reasonably, 'You spilled the drink on the floor. Dash me, you'd better pay for it. Only thing to do. Damned rowdies.' The waiter pushed Byrd violently and he fell back and disappeared among the densely packed dancers. Two or three people began to punch each other. A wild blow took me in the small of the back, but the attacker had moved on. I got both shoulder-blades rested against the nearest piece of wall and braced the sole of my right foot for leverage. One of the photographers came my way, but he kept going and wound up grappling with a waiter. There was a scuffle going on at the top of the staircase, and then violence travelled through the place like a flash flood. Everyone was punching everyone, girls were screaming and the music seemed to be even louder than before. A man hurried a girl along the corridor past me. 'It's those English that make the trouble,' he complained.

'Yes,' I said.

'You look English.'

'No, I'm Belgian,' I said. He hurried after the girl...'

Absolutely, well done!

Thanks for all of your replies. It may interest you to know that this article was originally a post in the forums from 1 February 2006 and I am very grateful for Qwerty to post it on the CBn main page. In this regard you could say that it is from my 'post archive' but I would say that I am still of the same opinion today as when I wrote the post last year.

In his defence, Gardner has went on the record to say that when he accepted the Bond job he was not a fan, but he acquired an affinity with the character over the years of writing about him. He was clearly a professional when it came to writing about subjects he may not have initially liked. He was actually going to post a reply that day to HRF Keating telling him 'Thanks but no thanks,' but his agent persuaded him otherwise and he decided that he would accept the offer as an unexpected challenge instead.

I'm sorry I missed the original thread. I see nobody replied to it, which is rather a shame. I hope we can have some sort of discussion now. Well, I find it interesting!

Gardner wasn't always consistent either. He told me in a phone interview in 2001 that he hadn't liked Bond much beforehand, but that over the years he had become even more bored of him. I'm paraphrasing and he may just have been in a bad mood about it on that day, of course - he hadn't been in great health and as a result of that I don't think the end of his tenure went as he liked. But when I asked him directly if he regretted saying yes to taking on the series he said yes, in a way he did regret it, because it was a no-win situation.

My instinct is that before taking the gig, Gardner disliked quite a lot about what Bond stood for and was probably what rabid Bond fans would call anti-Bond. Boysie Oakes is obviously an indirect pastiche of Bond, and I think it's clear from some of the changes he made with Bond that he'd have been in the camp that says Fleming was presenting a slightly silly fantasy of the espionage world as though it were reality. He did his best to counter it when he took over, I think to correct what he saw as the problems with the character. I think the fact that Gardner was a recovering alcoholic meant he probably saw Bond's lifestyle as not something he wished to promote - again, he changed that, too. You may be right that he acquired an affinity with the character over the years he wrote him - but that may also be partly to do with the fact that he changed the character to excise a lot of what he disliked about him! It's arguable if Gardner's Bond is always the same character as seen in Fleming.

spynovelfan - There were replies to this topic when I originally posted it in February 2006, and I remember you were one of those who kindly contributed to the discussion.

In fact here was the original post as it appeared:

http://debrief.commanderbond.net/index.php...c=28629&hl=

I remember it as I wrote the post, but I can understand how you can forget as it was a good while ago.

I think you're right that Gardner amended the elements that he didn't like. He wanted to give his version of the character, updated into a real-world intelligence setting and equipped for the very different world of the 1980s and 1990s.

Dr. Johnson once said that any man who didn't write for money was a blockhead. A nice adjective for Keating I should say. I'm not sure why writing for some deep-dish purpose is deeper guarantee of artistic merit than simply writing well and entertainingly. (What's wrong with writing to get readers and money anyway?) And don't the Bond novels, in their own un-self-important way, use "the spy story to say things about people and about the world"? Maybe that's not as obvious to some people. People also tend to forget that the Bond books were personal to Fleming--his own views and biographical experiences had saturated the series by the time of YOLT. He wasn't fully joking when he called the series his autobiography. It was, but one with outrageous bits of fantasy and wish-fulfillment mixed in. But it's no use saying all this--Fleming will always be a useful whipping boy for people eager to use him an example of frivolity, in contrast with the "I'm not just writing a spy story" heavy-weight littérateurs. Maybe someday people will get sick of this false dichotomy. In the meantime, perhaps we should be grateful that the deadening mantle of respectability and "serious literature" has yet to fall on (and smother) Fleming. Sometimes outlaw status is a good thing to have.



Perhaps it stemmed from his journalistic background. And perhaps also from his personality. Someone once described the hasty way the books were written by comparing them to someone hastily writing down his dreams from the night before, and I think that headlong, dreamlike quality is a major strength of the books, and one that might have been lost if Fleming had been a different sort of writer.



And even great works of art have uneven, badly wrought or downright boring passages, as anyone who's tried reading Melville, Dostoevsky, or Dickens (once a mere popular novelist himself) can attest. Not that I wish to place Fleming anywhere near or on their level. Perhaps nearer to that of Conan Doyle, whose own work survives for the same reason Fleming's might--sheer enjoyability coupled with ultimately inimitable idiosyncracity.



If so it's a bad likeness. Amis wouldn't have been caught dead comparing Bond with Baudelaire, or speaking in such a rhapsodic sing-song.



The first obligation of a hack. Not that I think Gardner's Bond work is sheer hackery (the first few novels are).



I'd say he wasn't. In the later books, Gardner' idea of improving the character along his own standards consisted of making him blander and more touchy-feely. Those books are more Bond pastiches than Bond novels. Personally, I think the only Bond continuation literature worth a damn is Pearson's Bond biography, the only work that's really on the originals' wavelength--not surprising, considering the author's qualifications.

This post has been edited by blackjack60: 19 October 2007 - 22:47

As I already said, I think we're being rather unfair to Mr Keating, who was speaking off the cuff in a programme about Len Deighton. Do we really need to crucify anyone who has a critical view of Ian Fleming?

'A bad likeness' - it was just an idea! For what it's worth, I don't think it was meant to be a specific parody of Amis and a close deconstruction of his style of writing, personal mannerisms or textual