A friend of mine once described to me the closest she ever gets to feeling she was flying (not using a plane but just bodily, like a superhero). And this is when she goes scuba diving: skimming close to the seabed and then, suddenly, feeling the sheer drop of an underwater abyss and oneself floating sublimely above the darkness.
This summer, I have frequently remembered our conversation. The pulp fiction I’ve been taking to the beach has been Ian Fleming’s oeuvre. I’ve never been able to figure out why the James Bond novels won the respect of craftsmen like Kingsley Amis and Umberto Eco. Amis, who didn’t need the money, tried his hand at continuing the series after Fleming died. Eco called the writing kitsch – but good kitsch – and dedicated time to show how and why.
Even after that demonstration, however, I still couldn’t get it. In his advice to writers, Fleming suggested they should not stop to correct and fuss over their text, no matter how many words they repeated. Otherwise, they would never get anywhere. Corrections would come later. Perhaps. But he himself did not correct nearly enough: the repetitions are tedious and laughable.
Fleming also advised – if one wanted to make money – to write with an eye on a film deal. So it’s worth remembering that Fleming’s Bond is rather different from hero of the Broccoli franchise. Suffice to say that Fleming thought of David Niven as the ideal image of Bond (whereas, by the 1960s, Niven could only pass as the parody of the super spy in that decade’s spoof, Casino Royale). Fleming’s Bond reflects the attitudes of the British upper class of the 1940s: well-dressed but not bothering to be the best dressed man in the room; still wearing his houndstooth suit after it started yellowing and still using his briefcase despite being battered.
For Eco, the writing is good (kitsch) because the use it makes of social distinctions and the reader’s aspirations to help us get into the mind of a hero who must otherwise remain inscrutable. At the beach, however, I’ve decided that Bond and the writing really come alive at the place where the social distinctions seem to disappear: at sea, under the sea, on the beach.
Fleming famously wrote his thrillers in Jamaica, his working day divided between writing, cocktails and swimming. And I now see the swims contributed at least as much as the cocktails. Some of the most lyrical passages in his writing are maritime scenes. And although Malta never figures in the plots (other than in a slim connection to Melina Havelock’s assassinated parents in For Your Eyes Only), the scenes seem familiar.
The literary critic, Margaret Cohen, does not discuss James Bond in her recent The Novel and the Sea (Princeton). But the themes she identifies in serious and popular fiction – French, British, American; from Smollett and Defoe to Jules Verne and Melville – must have been well absorbed by Fleming, as they were by the film franchise.
The sea features prominently not just in Thunderball (and its underwater dogfight) but also in You Only Live Twice, The Man With The Golden Gun (where the isolated elitism of the villain is represented by the island he owns) and various short stories. The film franchise, in inventing a story for The Spy Who Loved Me, gives the villain an underwater lair.
The sea seems to be the right imaginative setting, for both the fiction and the films, for three themes that Ms Cohen underlines. First, there is the sea as the environment of cunning – quick, practical thinking, like that of Ulysses, inseparable from physical agility and skill.
On land, Bond is often portrayed as loyal servant of the Crown, not questioning his mission. Underwater, we can observe his philosophy as we observe him drawing lessons from the beautiful brutality of marine life. It is also underwater that we can observe his strength when relaxed and that he can observe other divers as though torn from life’s comedy of manners.
Second, although Bond is the servant of a nation state, the sea as a setting is international (or transnational). When the villains are using the sea to get away, to hide their booty or weapons of mass destruction, the detection, the chase and the fight gives the plot the grandeur of a planetary interest.
Obviously the films have brought this out more. It is no coincidence that they have sometimes alternated – between films, or within films – between showing the major setting as the sea and other times as outer space.
The sea takes the motifs of detective fiction away from the body in the library into a space that belongs to us all.
Third, with Bond, as with Jules Verne, the sea becomes the setting for a form of science fiction – a theatre of society and science, of knowledge as power. It hides vital state and criminal secrets.
We cannot really say about Fleming – as Carly Simon sang in The Spy Who Loved Me – that nobody does it better. Many do. But reading James Bond on the beach taps into some of the powerful ways in which maritime fiction has come to haunt our imagination in the last few hundred years.
ranierfsadni@europe.com