This podcast was written for the miniseries on Thrillers for Gentlemen. I was looking at the kind of thriller or spy novel that was masculine without being brutal, and that was written about men of a certain generation who understood the value of the gentleman’s club, and worked within its rules. These thrillers were tough, but with good manners.
I was reading Bond, James Bond. I love Ian Fleming’s writing, and used to read him addictively when I was a student, seeking relief from the sterner kinds of books I had to work through when I was writing my PhD. I owned most of the novels, in nice 1950s Pan editions, but moved house too often to keep them, and now I only have one rather horrible mass-market anthology of Bond that I bought cheap when I really could not live without reading Dr No once more. But this podcast was about Bond, rather than about one particular novel. I wanted to see what I could find out about Bond as a product of gentlemanly writing for the clubman and for the post-Second World War officer and gentleman.
Let’s start with who Bond is. He’s ex-Royal Navy, with the rank of Commander, which means he wore three gold stripes and a ring as his uniform insignia while still in the Service. This is the same rank in the US Navy, and is equivalent to Lieutenant-Colonel in the British and US armies. So he’s fairly high up the tree, but not into top brass territory. Now, of course, forever and in perpetuity, he is 007, authorised to kill in Her Majesty’s secret service. In the novels his boss is M, also ex-Navy, and a titled gentleman who, in Moonraker, takes Bond with him to Blades, the venerable card club in St James, Mayfair, to play cards.
Blades is, of course, totally fictional, but is written with such assurance by Fleming that you have to google the place to be embarrassed at how well you’ve been fooled into accepting it as real. Fleming invented this club to be able to write about its activities and members without fear of libel. He also wanted to take Bond to a place where he would fit in, and know how to behave, but would probably not be asked to join, or even want to. Bond is not a fogey; he is a modern, post-war hero. The conflict he has with senior colleagues, even his adversaries, stems from this whipper-snapper identity. He is probably only just past 35 or so, but still fearsomely fit and impressively knowledgeable about pretty much everything, especially manly things to do with metal and power and speed. He knows how to behave in different social circumstances (which is something Fleming borrowed from Buchan: in 1936 the Earl of Clanroyden got away with being disguised as a surrealiste. Was Bond ever a beatnik, or into Sartre?) But is he a gentleman?
Well, we need to look at his record. Let’s stay with Moonraker, a novel published in 1955, and the only Bond novel that Fleming wrote (because, of course, the canon has been extended by many other writers since Fleming’s death: I’m only looking at Fleming’s own novels) that was set entirely in the UK. Unfortunately, the very name Moonraker brings to mind the truly terrible film starring Roger Moore as Bond, which only had the name of the phallic rocket in common with the book. Forget about that. Sweep away those ludicrous images of wrinkly Roger Moore trying to look passionate and stern in a space suit with ankle ties, and think about sharp navy blue suits and a vintage Bentley.
Moonraker starts in a basement firing room, where Bond is trying to beat the machines. He’s still not quite as good as the automatic firing devices he’s been pitted against by the armaments trainer, but, as we learn when Bond has left, he’s the best gun they’ve got. So he’s a sharpshooter: does this make him a gentleman? No. However, the fact that he and the master gunner have a bet on, and Bond loses, and pays up cheerfully, does make him a gentleman. Paying one’s debts is one of the first rules of correct gentlemanly behaviour, and Bond qualifies easily. The reason he’s taken to Blades by M is to see if he can beat a habitual cheat at cards, and he does this easily because he knows how to cheat too. Would a true gentleman know how to cheat at cards? I think so, yes, because a gentleman can recognise ungentlemanly behaviour. Gentlemanly behaviour is mostly unconscious, inherent, the result of training from birth; but it certainly helps to know when the edges of gentlemanhood are being breached, to maintain these standards. It’s also useful for a gentleman to be sufficiently at home in a gentleman’s surroundings, but also able to bring in the rough stuff, when needed.
Next, we see Bond in the office, and hear a lot about his secretary Loelia Ponsonby. Where does Fleming get his women’s names from? The men’s names are either nationality caricatures or anonymous, like ‘Bond’, whereas the women are saddled with impossible names like Moneypenny, Goodnight, Trueblood. They also all wear beautiful clothes. This is one of Fleming’s great strengths as a writer: the magazine-like focus on consumer detail in the descriptions. His attention to the details of the food and guns and drink that Bond consumes are famous, but his fashion writing is really very evocative. Loelia Ponsonby, as a good civil service secretary, wears a skirt and a blouse, as does Miss Moneypenny, and Gala Brand later in the novel, but it’s the detail of a hand-sewn belt and the colour coordination, that grip me. A mere man could only have written that by poring over Vogue beforehand. Does Bond subscribe?
We are told that Bond and the other 00 chaps in that office had cheerfully made assaults on their secretary’s virtue, but that she refused to allow herself to get too fond of any one of them because any one of them could be dead before the end of the next mission. She sounds like a sensible person, and they sound like perfectly normal youngish men, but are they gentlemen, in that regard? Probably not as John Buchan would have understood it, especially if the assaults on her virtue were more about list-ticking conquests after drinks than the expression of a lifelong, monogamous passion, but we are now in the 1950s, after all. Fleming wants us to understand Bond as an all-conquering sex god. We are also asked to believe that Bond cares properly about the women who come his way. In Moonraker we see him stymied, all ready to have an affair with a girl whom he thinks has earned it, and then she tells him quite nicely that the man waiting politely some yards behind her is her fiancé and that they’re getting married tomorrow. Bond behaves very well, and they say goodbye and walk out of each other’s lives. But I do wonder, to whom did he take his bruised pride? He has a string of married women, it appears, with whom he makes love rather coldly at weekends, so perhaps he’ll go and ring one of them up. On being rejected, a gentleman will never make a fuss and will always sublimate his desires decently in something, or someone, discreet and harmless. Another woman, preferably an anonymous one, seems a heartless choice for a gentleman who’s just been rejected, but he may not have been very much into the first girl in the first place. However, he behaves decently, and that’s what matters.
The girl in my favourite Bond novel, Dr No, is Honeychile Rider, a child of nature and what we would now call a zoologist. She’s child-like but not that innocent, and very keen to have sex with Bond, without shame. It’s good for thrillers to have shameless women in them, it gives the sex scenes exuberance without the squealing modesty that must get so boring when you’ve only got a few hours. Honeychile reminds me a lot of Jenny, from Dornford Yates’ thriller She Fell Among Thieves, because Jenny is alarmingly child-like, totally lacking lack in nous and worldly wisdom. Yates created her character to allow some titillating voyeurism in the novel, and to offer a very strange fantasy of an adult bride with a child’s understanding, but Honeychile is not quite that disturbing. She is afraid of land crabs, but she sails Bond back to Jamaica in the dark: a practical role in the plot. She supports herself, lives alone, can and does defend herself, is a born but untaught scientist, and, very importantly, as we only find out at the end, she is a lady. For a gentleman to have an affair it is much better if his partner is at the same social level as well as cultural level. Bond does not have many (any?) affairs with prostitutes. As the orphaned child of an old Jamaican landowning family, Honeychile deserves to be launched in the world properly, whether she gets her broken nose fixed or not, so Bond arranges for her to be found a job at the Zoological Institute in Kingstown, and asks his local friend to get his wife to take Honeychile under her wing socially. We know that soon she’ll be wearing the right clothes and will know where to get her hair done properly. But first she and Bond will have sex in a sleeping-bag because he owes her slave-time. These are gentlemanly courtesies.
The actions of a gentleman are also concerned with noblesse oblige. Bond feels nothing towards what Fleming calls the ‘Chigroes’, the Chinese-negro Jamaicans who work for Dr No, because they are mixed race, and thus in Fleming’s 1950s world view, living on Jamaica, they are socially and culturally inferior to the colonial whites. He also feels nothing for the Chinese girls who flit through this novel, mainly because they are all Dr No’s creatures, but also, I suspect, because they are not presented as people. Fleming just drew them as women of a certain race, and their race is what defines them: not their names or personalities. So these, like the prostitutes, are not where Bond will look for sex (because sex is the only thing he could possibly want from these women). He is protective and admiring of his friend Quarrel, whom he takes on as fixer and local contact once he arrives in Jamaica, but Quarrel, a big warm black man from the Cayman Islands, sleeps on a separate part of the beach from Bond because Bond is his master. Yet Quarrel is indispensable, a knowledgeable hero with the wrong colour of skin for Fleming’s readers. He knows everything important locally, hires the equipment, arranges to lose the car, knows the route, has the expertise, and is the one to die. Why does Quarrel die, and not Honeychile? Maybe because a gentleman can protect a girl better, and is able to fight for his own survival more effectively as part of the struggle to save her? Quarrel is very effective; he just got caught in the wrong place by a flame-thrower. In the 1950s, it was easier to show a character being a gentleman to a white lady, than to a black man.
Kate Macdonald 