Literary Review, diary
Scepticism and superstition are the writer’s guiding stars. This is true of biography especially. Before consecrating years of your life to plotting someone else’s, you can be spookily receptive to even the most trivial signs.
When approached to write a new authorized biography of Ian Fleming, the first since 1966, my initial reaction was hesitation. Could I face spending so long in the company of a cad – the only caricature I had of Fleming, someone I knew little about? (Only lately have I come to recognise a moral of his story: Don’t run off with the wife of the owner of the Mail – the sole newspaper not to have reviewed the biography, incidentally – if you don’t wish forever after being rendered into tabloid fat).
Before deciding, I did some background research, and found to my surprise that Fleming, the sardonic bounder in charge of “in-trays, out-trays and ash-trays”, was kinder and more significant than his popular image. What clinched my decision, though, was to come across mysterious connections which, taken together, amounted to proof that Fleming might be an appropriate subject after all.
By a strange set of coincidences, before he joined Fleming as his “leg man” on Atticus, John Pearson, Fleming’s first authorized biographer, had shared a desk at the Times Educational Supplement with my father, who himself went on afterwards to perform an identical role for Fleming’s successor as Foreign Manager, Frank Giles. After I brought the two former colleagues together for lunch 66 years later, Pearson not only gave me blessing to enter his biographical domain, he also handed me a gift: his “Fleming file”.
This wasn’t the only Shakespeare link. In 1915, my paternal grandfather and Fleming’s father Val Fleming had breathed in the same cloud of chlorine gas at Ypres when Val helped Major W. G. Shakespeare carry 359 stretchers to a field. For the first months of WWII, my great-uncle Geoffrey Shakespeare worked directly above Fleming’s desk at Room 39 when he was Churchill’s “indefatigable second in command” at the Admiralty. From a younger generation, my eldest son chanced to be in the same school house as Fleming and, like him, was Victor Ludorum.
As well, I found connections on my mother’s side. Her father, the prolific author S. P. B. Mais, who had taught Alec Waugh at Sherborne and got published his first novel The Loom of Youth, had impressed on Waugh the inflexible rule for his writing (2000 words a day without fail, sticking to a routine “from which nothing must be allowed to deter you”). Waugh would pass this on to Fleming, along with a story about our black Jamaican relatives that then inspired, so Waugh’s son Peter believed, Alec’s 1955 bestseller Island in the Sun – the Hollywood film of which impressed a young music producer in Jamaica to name his company Island Records: Chris Blackwell is now the owner of Goldeneye, where Fleming wrote all 14 Bond books.
On my wife’s side, a coincidence more arresting still. It was her Icelandic-Canadian father, Dr George Johnson who, it turned out, was credited with revealing the true identity of William Stephenson, “the Quiet Canadian” and “Man called Intrepid”, who Fleming once saluted as his chief model for Bond. In 1980, Dr Johnson disclosed the reasons that Stephenson had not dared step foot in his Winnipeg birthplace since 1922. In that year, the quiet Canadian had fled Winnipeg as a bankrupt, having swindled 95 of my father-in-law’s patients, following the collapse of a company fabricating can-openers. Stephenson had not been called Intrepid, this was the cable address for his wartime office in New York. He was not even called Stephenson, but Stanger, the son of a first-generation Icelandic immigrant mother who had abandoned him to my wife’s relatives, the Stefánssons, whose surname he adopted and anglicized.
Excited to discover these tenuous links, I said yes.
In Jaipur five years on to promote Ian Fleming: the Complete Man, I am introduced on stage by a nervous Matthew Parker, author of Goldeneye, one of the best books on Fleming, as “Nicholas Coleridge”, the next Provost of Eton. It’s a necessary reminder that authors are interchangeable. The novelist John Fowles told me he was once presented on air in America by a radio host who had muddled his notes, as “the singing nun of Milwaukee”.
After working on your own, it’s a joy to be out singing for your supper with fellow writers like Peter Frankopan, the “academic rock star” (as he is introduced). Following Peter’s talk, since it’s raining, his wife Jessica and I continue sitting in a tent growing steadily more packed for the next speaker, a small old Indian lady in an orange sari, who will attract the festival’s largest crowd by far, many yelling for her to stand up so they can glimpse her. Although Mrs Murthy is slated as the author of 32 books, neither Jessica nor I have any inkling who she is. From an extract then read on stage by her biographer, I’m forming the impression that she might be the owner of a popular Jaipur bookshop when Jessica jabs me. She’s goggling her i-phone. “It’s Rishi Sunak’s mother-in-law!” A woman whose £4 billion fortune most assuredly does come from writing or selling books. Yet not once in 45 minutes of homely wisdom (“Life is not a smart phone. You press a button and sometimes wait for months for something to happen”) does Mrs Murthy mention that her daughter is married to Britain’s Prime Minister.
I’m preparing to fly back to Tasmania when an email arrives – from none other than Nicholas Coleridge. “Just to say I’m glued to your Fleming biog. I’m reading it poolside at Goldeneye too.”
I could have told my doppelganger that I landed in Goldeneye by helicopter with an Ursula Andress-lite Rachel Johnson; also, that Fleming’s boutique retreat (now $8,000+ a night) is not a patch on my Tasmanian beach shack. I’ve had it for 25 years and written part of nine books here, including The Complete Man. Facing Antarctica, and as far from England as you can travel, it’s a place where the world shrinks into formidable focus. Bush fires (three this summer already), ocean rising, the sudden absence of flathead in the bay – these are what matter, not the small change of an author’s vanities and insecurities. The first author I ever met was Borges, who told me: “Five minutes of anyone’s life is worth more than all of Shakespeare.” Yet even Shakespeare doesn’t singe too many Tasmanian sleeves. I was fishing on the otherwise deserted beach when a white-bearded fellow started talking to me and after a while asked my name. I told him, and he was unable to rein in his excitement. “I don’t believe it,” he said, coming a step closer and looking me in the eye, as if to reassure himself that what I said was true. “You can’t… you can’t possibly be related to the family who make fishing rods?”