And Yet... (15 page)

Anyway, for the first time in my life I had found a book that everybody else, including my pustular contemporaries, had also read. And this was very handy for the give-and-take of textual criticism. Today, however, I can be virtually certain that most Americans below a certain age know of Fleming solely, or chiefly, through the movies. It is under this guise only that the product has been bonded for universal export.

People like to condescend to the brand-name snobbery and Savile
Row (or Bond Street) affectation, but these are only the outward show of two of the books' most important elements. When Fleming started to publish his stories, Britain was only just emerging from a long period of postwar austerity and uniformity, and it was beginning to be possible to emphasize luxury and style again without having a bad conscience. This development was somewhat identified with the return of the British Conservatives to power, and helped enable Fleming to be more frankly Churchillian and pro-imperial than would have been possible a few years previously.

The second element, namely a distinctive blend of fine leather, good tailoring, and club-land confidence, was of huge importance in appealing to American Anglophilia—perhaps most especially the sort of Anglophilia that had led the United States to clone the Office of Strategic Services, and later the CIA, from the British MI5 and MI6. Fleming himself had played a supporting part in this process, visiting wartime Washington for the British Naval Intelligence Division and writing a lengthy memo on the ways in which London could be of help to “the Cousins.” He was to pay another call in 1960, to meet John F. Kennedy and discuss a number of demented schemes for the elimination of Fidel Castro. (In 1961,
Life
magazine printed the boy president's list of “top ten” books, with
From Russia with Love
coming in at number nine; we have paid dearly for this juvenile taste.) In the interim, however, British imperialism had come to a humiliating halt at Suez in 1956, as a direct consequence of President Eisenhower's refusal to support the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Fleming had every reason to take this personally: the British prime minister at the time, Sir Anthony Eden, had gone at least temporarily insane and been forced to take a long rest—which he did at Goldeneye, Fleming's private Jamaican retreat.

Thus, the central paradox of the classic Bond stories is that, although superficially devoted to the Anglo-American war against Communism, they are full of contempt and resentment for America and Americans. And not just political contempt, or the penis envy of a declining power for a burgeoning one, but cultural contempt as well.
And not just with cultural contempt in general, but more specifically disgust about America's plebeian interest in sex and consumerism, the two Bond staples. “Baseball, amusement arcades, hot dogs, hideously large bosoms, neon lighting” is how Tiger Tanaka mouths the anti-American trope in
You Only Live Twice
. And how does Bond react when praised by the exquisite Tatiana Romanova for his resemblance to an American film star? By barking, “For God's sake! That's the worst insult you can pay a man!” This and other revulsions from the Hollywood ethos (a similar distaste is evinced in
For Your Eyes Only
) are an irony in themselves. And notice, please, that emphasis on “hideously large bosoms.” Some displacement seems to be involved here. For Fleming, it was the southern hemispheres that counted, and size mattered like hell.

I am afraid that the mention of Tatiana Romanova obliges me to record that Fleming described her otherwise peerless behind as “so hardened with exercise that it had lost the smooth downward feminine sweep, and now, round at the back and flat and hard at the sides, it jutted like a man's.” Not quite like a boy's, in other words. How is one to deal with the blizzard of information on this point? From Lycett's biography we learn that the young Fleming had not only a mentor whose pseudonym was Phyllis Bottome but also a lover named Monique Panchaud de Bottomes. This might be coincidence (it could hardly be conspiracy), but in that same premature
Times
obituary, ostensibly written by “M,” we are expected to believe that the newly orphaned Bond was sent to live with an aunt in the “quaintly named” Kentish hamlet of Pett Bottom. “That was just a love-pat,” says the boorish Australian “Dikko” Henderson in
For Your Eyes Only
, after he's floored a Japanese chick. “What's a girl's bottom for, anyway?” Fleming himself appeared to have a ready answer to this question. As he wrote to his complaisant future wife, who seems to have shared some of his tastes, “I am the chosen instrument of the Holy Man to whip some of the devil out of you, and I must do my duty however much pain it causes me. So be prepared to drink your cocktails standing for a few days.”

When one really reflects on the memorable scenes in the fiction (shall I say those that stick out?), it becomes obvious that Fleming expended much more careful thought on torture than on sex. It is true that Bond's bottom is never threatened (Coward would have put a swift stop to any of
that
), but the other menaces and taunts and practices are distinctly lascivious and lovingly rehearsed. Even Simon Raven, giving
Casino Royale
an admiring review, protested that the torture scene was essentially unpardonable.

But there is no point in being prissy about this. If Fleming had not been quite a heavy sadist and narcissist and all-around repressed pervert, we might never have got to know Rosa Klebb or Auric Goldfinger or Ernst Stavro Blofeld. And, having said that Bond was originally a figure designed to hold up the British end of the “special relationship,” I ought to add that the cleverness of the series lay partly in how it saw past the confines of the Cold War. The transition probably begins after
From Russia with Love
. Who would have believed a paranoid tale about the Bulgarians shooting the pope in 1982 if it had not been for the memory of Moscow's Bulgar robots in that adventure? The stories are a kind of bridge from the period of ideological warfare to our own, where the fear of a frigid colossus or a nuclear “exchange” has been deposed by the fear of an uncorked psychopath and a “dirty bomb.” However anal that last stupid expression may be (a toilet-trained bomb is perhaps more a wish than a possibility), it was Fleming who first conjured it and who reached beyond the KGB into our world of the Colombian cartel, the Russian mafia, and other “non-state actors” like al-Qaeda. “SPECTRE,” I noticed recently, is an anagram of “Respect,” the name of a small British party led by a power-drunk micro-megalomaniac called George Galloway, a man with a friendly connection to Saddam Hussein.

Also rather contemporary, at least from one end of the special relationship, is the cold dislike of France that keeps recurring. Le Chiffre and Goldfinger both act for the French Communists. Rosa Klebb can operate in Paris with ease, thanks to the climate of treason that pervades the place. Bond finds Paris empty and hypocritical, like a cynical whore.
“It was its heart that was gone,” Fleming writes, “pawned to the tourists, pawned to the Russians and Rumanians and Bulgars, pawned to the scum of the world who had gradually taken the town over.” That reflection occurs in “From a View to a Kill,” published in 1960 in the short-story collection
For Your Eyes Only
, where even Castro's rebels are granted some grudging sympathy (the Caribbean then being Britain's backyard, thanks all the same, and not some polluted Yankee pond).

Fleming once confessed that he hoped to “take the story along so fast that nobody would notice the idiosyncrasies.” Fat chance. His “idiosyncrasies” jut out like Tatiana Romanova's ass. What he ought to have said was that he hoped to pile on the pace and thereby hustle the reader past the point where belief has to be suspended. The smaller details, of products and appurtenances and accessories, fulfill the function of the conjuror's other hand. They distract attention from the glaring lacunae in the plots, the amazing stupidity of the supposedly mastermind villains, and the reckless disregard for his own safety that this supposedly ice-cold agent displays by falling for every lure. Another critic whose exegesis might have startled Bond's creator was Umberto Eco, who wrote:

Fleming takes time to convey the familiar with photographic accuracy, because it is upon the familiar that he can solicit our capacity for identification. Our credulity is solicited, blandished, directed to the region of possible and desirable things. Here the narration is realistic, the attention to detail intense; for the rest, so far as the unlikely is concerned, a few pages suffice and an implicit wink of the eye.

The movie industry saw through this trick and learned, with such a big wink, how to replicate it for the masses and to make even Fleming's pulp fiction look like literature. Fleming was angling for Hollywood, however much he may have despised it.

(
The Atlantic
, April 2006)

B
ECAUSE I AM
a supporter of the armed struggle against the forces of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein, I quite often get asked if I have become a Republican in my declining years. Never mind for now the many reactionary Republicans, from Brent Scowcroft to Patrick J. Buchanan, who are my enemies in this argument: the fact is that I have been a republican all my life. Not in the sense that I favor the reunification of Ireland—though I certainly do—but in the sense of being opposed to all forms of monarchy and absolutism. I moved to the United States a quarter of a century ago, partly to escape the British royal family (whose publicity alas followed me across the Atlantic) and partly because it was much easier to be an independent writer in a country that had a written constitution and a codified Bill of Rights. After the barbaric assault on American civil society that took place on September 11, 2001, I resolved to stop cheating on my dues and applied to become a citizen, and although my paperwork seems to have vanished into the hideous maelstrom that goes by the name “Homeland Security,” I consider myself to be standing in line to take a formal oath to defend that constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

In January of this year I found myself involved in two legal actions, one in my country of adoption and another in my country of
birth, both directed at arbitrary power. In the first instance, I was contacted by Anthony Romero, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He asked if I would agree to become a plaintiff in a suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and by implication against the Justice Department. It had been disclosed that the NSA was engaging in widespread warrantless surveillance of American citizens. It seemed obvious to me (and the suit alleges) that this violated the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution, in that it hampered the confidentiality with which reporters and scholars and lawyers must work, in the Middle East and western Asia, and in that it was an unreasonable invasion of privacy rights. The First Amendment is how I make my living. But it is precious to me in other ways, in that it stands against any infringement of free expression. So I said yes.

I then had to fill out a questionnaire about my travels to, and contacts in, such countries as Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Indonesia, all of which I have covered for this magazine in the past few years. One of the questions asked if I was in contact with any person or group that the United States government could regard as being associated with terrorists. I would have paused at this anyway. Most of those with whom I exchange e-mail or phone traffic in Iraq and Afghanistan are dedicated to defeating the forces of bin Ladenism. But then there was this other little matter I'd gotten myself involved with. Two men were about to step into a dock in a London court: one of them, named David Keogh, is a former official in Prime Minister Tony Blair's Cabinet Office, and the other, named Leo O'Connor, is an alleged recipient of a document from Keogh. What the document is said to show is this: that on April 16, 2004, President George Bush proposed bombing the Al Jazeera network headquarters, in Qatar, and was talked out of it only by Tony Blair. Now, I have visited those same offices and have friends there, and I sometimes appear on Al Jazeera chat shows. So it seemed that, by one definition at least, I did have contact with suspected-terrorist targets. I had given some help in Washington to a team of British reporters at the London
Daily Mirror
, which broke the story, and also exchanged information with
a celebrated British lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, who had drafted a Freedom of Information request in London, on behalf of Al Jazeera, in order to get a look at the relevant memo.

Both these actions have quite momentous implications. In the case of the first, our lawsuit alleges that President Bush has flat out broken the law: the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set out “
the exclusive means by which
electronic surveillance . . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.” (My italics.) These “exclusive means” do not include the words “by secret presidential fiat.” In the second case, if the allegation is true, it means that a very important center of communications, in a neutral country friendly to the United States (and host of the U.S. Central Command), would have been blitzed. I've tried to imagine the possible effect of that in the Arab world, but can't quite manage to do so. Let's just say that it would have put a large and smoldering hole in Karen Hughes's “make nice” diplomacy. It would furthermore have raised the suspicion that the American bombing of Al Jazeera's Baghdad office, in 2003, which killed a reporter, had not been a regrettable accident.