Ian Fleming: In His Own Words

Loeffelholz

I recently acquired a copy of the December 1964 issue of Playboy magazine, which features an excellent---and enlightening---interview with Ian Fleming, published about three months after his death:

http://www.ajb007.co.uk/articles/ian-fleming-in-his-own-words/

To make myself clear: I take no credit for the writing of this article! All I wrote was the one-paragraph intro, and the individual subject headers. A trained chimpanzee could have done that. The rest is merely the loneliest of intelligence assignments: that of transcription B-)

Rather than attempting to interpret or editorialize the contents, I decided to let the creator of James Bond 007 speak for himself...

Therefore, the piece has been framed as extended monologues---by Fleming---on a number of subjects, which will hopefully be as interesting to you as they were to me...

Any comments or questions would be most welcome...in addition, I might place additional excerpts in this thread (great stuff, but they would have made an already lengthy article even moreso! ), if anyone is interested.

Plus, the centerfold that month, one Jo Collins, was quite fetching ;% I think Fleming---and Bond---would have approved :007)

I'll keep her for myself :x

Sweepy the Cat

Nice fing Loef

Hardyboy

Loeffelholz wrote:

To make myself clear: I take no credit for the writing of this article! All I wrote was the one-paragraph intro, and the individual subject headers. A trained chimpanzee could have done that.

Some people could learn from you, Loeff. And though you did little to no writing, you did a superb job of editing the article and presenting it in a professional way. Cheers! -{

Alex

Wonderful material. Thanks for providing this essential interview, Loeff.

(and tell Jo I said hi)

7289

It's the voice of Fleming himeself, always a pleasure to read "The Master's" observations and explanations.

Well done and THANKS!!!!

-{

Red Indian

Thanks very much Loeff!

"He's certainly got little in the way of politics, but I should think what politics he has are just a little bit left of centre."

Fascinating! I don't think i'd read that before!

I wonder if this is again one of Fleming's personal "quirks" (as he would say) that he chose to give Bond?

scaramanga1

Excellent article -very much appreciated. -{ -{ -{

00-Agent

Loeffelholz wrote:

Any comments or questions would be most welcome...in addition, I might place additional excerpts in this thread (great stuff, but they would have made an already lengthy article even moreso! ), if anyone is interested.

Great article, thanks! I'd be interested in additional excerpts.:)

jetsetwilly

Excellent find, and excellent article Loeff - thanks for passing it on.

Interesting to note Fleming talking about creating SPECTRE himself. This was post the Thunderball trial, and yet he makes no mention of McClory or Whittingham - he gives his reasons for coming up with SPECTRE.

Barry Nelson

First, I didn't know they had articles in Playboy. )

Second, fascinating article, thanks for posting I really enjoyed it.

I have always said the style that differentiates Fleming from others is his pacing. The stories really move and I think that can be attributed to the way he writes the stories, which he described in the article. Thanks again for posting.

frostbitten

Thanks for sharing that great article with us.

I find some parts of it quite fascinating, such as Fleming's description of his approach to writing, his attention to details, and of course his views on Bond.

JADE66

Bravo. I congratulate you, sir. And I thank you. BRAVO.-{

Willie Garvin

Thanks very much,Loeff!

I've wanted to read this particular interview for years(like you,I only look at Playboy for it's articles),but never believed the chance would ever arise.

It's fascinating to learn--firsthand--what Ian Fleming actually thought of his creation, as opposed to what his biographers and critics have told the public.Short though it is,the insights revealed in this interview are important and illuminating.:)

Loeffelholz

Thanks very much, gents {[] It was my distinct pleasure. I really appreciate your having a look---and even moreso taking the time to post a response.

Here's a 'Bonus Bit'...

On Creative Neurosis

"I think that to be a creative writer or a creative anything else, you've got to be neurotic. I certainly am in many respects. I'm not really quite certain how, but I am. I'm rather melancholic and probably slightly maniacal as well. It's rather an involved subject, and I'm afraid my interest in it does not go deeper than the realization that the premise does apply to myself. Possibly it all began with an overpriveleged childhood."

On His Education

"I didn't take up my commission after Sandhurst simply because they had suddenly decided to mechanize the army, and a lot of my pals and I decided that we didn't want to be glorified garage hands, and that the great days of the cavalry regiments were passing, or shortly would be ended forever---no more polo, no more pigsticking and all that jazz. So a lot of us, having taken our commissions, just gave them up. I was born in 1908; this would have been around 1925, and disillusionment of that kind---and kinds more severe---was common then, as you know. My mother was infuriated. My father had been killed in the First War, and my mother felt responsible for imposing discipline of me and my three brothers, who were all doing splendidly. She insisted that I must do something, something respectable, and so I opted for the Foreign Office. I went abroad to learn languages. I went to the University of Geneva and the University of Munich. I don't think of myself as a linguist, but I know French and German very well, because one must if one has any serious inclination toward the Foreign Office. You have to have French and German first-class and one other language partially, which in my case was Russian. My languages are all that remain to me of my original education."

More to come...

Colonel Johns

Hi Loeff, I'll echo the comments above, this is wonderful, revealing material.

One line struck me as being oddly intriguing:

"I correct some proofs or go over whatever I happen to be working on at the moment and have lunch with a friend---always a male friend; I don't like having lunch with women---and perhaps I go to my club."

It seems so Fleming to just say "I don't like having lunch with women" in such a matter-of-fact way with no explanation. It makes me wonder what might have happened to cause him to feel that way. It also seems like the kind of trait he might have passed on to Bond. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I thought it could form the opening to a Fleming short story:

---

James Bond didn't like having lunch with women. Women were for later in the day; dinner at the earliest, but preferably later still, as the final stake after a tough night of gambling or as an antidote to the jangling nerves and dirty memories that accompanied the violent events of his professional life. He preferred lunch to be a solitary affair - an opportunity to assess the morning's progress and plan the remainder of the day - or, failing that, a chance to discuss one of his few hobbies - golf, motor racing, skiing - with a like-minded colleague. As he reluctantly turned his gaze from the passersby on Rue de Rivoli back to Mathis's P.A., he realized too late that her monotonous chatter had ended and that she was staring at him quizzically from across the table, eyebrows arched in expectation. Christ, she must have asked him a question! Now what the hell had she been going on about? How the May weather had been colder than usual this year? The unprecedented number of drownings in the Seine? He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and felt sweat begin to tickle his palms. He was spared further embarrassment by the sudden appearance of Mathis, twenty minutes late, making his way quickly down the aisle to their table. In that moment of relief, he decided his lunchtime prejudices were not likely to change any time soon.

---

Loeffelholz

You've got a pretty good 'Fleming voice,' Colonel. You should offer your services to the 'Fan Fiction' gang... :007)

Some more from Fleming himself:

On Languages

"They are a tremendous extension of one's life generally, whereas all the other stuff I've learned---algebra and trigonometry and all that---I've completely forgotten, and as far as I know, none of it was ever of any use to me at all, in any case. But having languages is a tremendous help. You've got to live abroad for two years at least to learn a language. When I came home, I took the Foreign Office examination, but I passed seventh and there were only five vacancies, and that was that."

On Collecting

"So I started looking around for work that would fit in with what talents and abilities I possessed. All I had done up to that time, aside from a great deal of studying, had been to begin collecting. I had decided, after concerning myself with first editions for a time, that I would collect books that signalized a right-angle turn in the world's thought on any particular subject, a book of permanent value in the history of the world. I began to think through every human activity, from art to sports and physics and whatnot, and with the help of a great friend of mine who is still my bookseller, we got out a tremendous list of the great books of the world since 1800, which we arbitrarily decided to make the starting date. They go from Karl Marx' Das Kapital to Ely Culbertson's first book on contact bridge, which changed the bridge-playing world---books on everything, the invention of mechanical devices of every kind, of the miner's lamp, radar, billiards, every kind of subject. This collection gradually got up to about two thousand volumes, all first editions, all in the best possible state, and today it is one of the most valuable private collections in the world. It was considered of such importance that the Bodleian Library at Oxford cared for it during the War. It's now in storage waiting for us to get into the house we're building near Oxford, where I can have a proper library, which I've never had before. Incidentally, mixed up with that, I later bought a small magazine, The Book Collector, which is now probably the leading bibliographical magazine in the world."

Donald Grant

Nice job!

DG

7289

Again, reading Fleming is always a pleasure.

Thanks!

Loeffelholz

On Journalism, and the Transition to Intelligence Work

"Because a man called Sir Roderick Jones, who was chairman of Reuter's, was a friend of my mother's, I went into Reuter's, the great international news agency. I stayed with them for three years and had the most exciting time of my life, because in those days news-agency work was like a gigantic football match, and Reuter's and the Associated Press, of America, were a part of the Allied Agency group, and there were free-booters such as United Press and Inernational News who were trying to break into our territories all around the world. We had some superb battles in Germany and Russia, and so on, and it was all highly enjoyable. It was in Reuter's that I learned to write fast and, above all, to be accurate, because in Reuter's if you weren't accurate you were fired, and that was the end of that.

"...the world being as it was in the 1930s, I would do the same as I did then. But today, with the world as it is now, I must say, I really don't know what I'd do. I'd travel enormously, find some sort of job that would take me round the world, and round and round and round it, and I should think I would probably go back to newspaper work---as a TV newsman, I should think; rather a different article from his counterpart of a few decades ago, although the effort is the same. Nowadays, of course, one's so hamstrung by trade unions and that sort of thing that some of the fun's gone out of the game. In those days the paper came out first, the story came first, you were out to beat hell out of the opposition, and the pay and the hours of work meant nothing. Of course, for that one must be young and strong and, I suppose, romantic; it's a different matter if one's fifty-six and has a wife and child.

"...when I left Reuter's, I did a period in The City [London's business and financial district] as a partner in the firm of Rowe and Pitman's, one of the great English stockbroking firms, extemely nice fellows. It was a very pleasant sort of City club---they're still great friends of mine today---but I got rather fed up, and The Times gave me a special correspondent's job to to to Moscow on a trade mission. When I got back from that in about March or April of 1939, suddenly I began to hear funny questions being asked about me; friends would tell me that so-and-so had been asking about where I had been, what did I know, and so on. This turned out to be a quiet casing for a job in Naval Intelligence; and the reason was that because, of all people, the governor of the Bank of England and the head of Baring Brothers, a very big merchant-banking firm in The City, had been asked to find a man about my age with good languages and some knowledge of The City, which in fact I hadn't got at all. In any case, it ended up with a luncheon at the Carlton Hotel, with the Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral J. H. Godfrey, still my warm friend, and a couple of other very quiet characters in plain clothes, and I suddenly found myself in the Admiralty with an honorary rank of lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and put down as Personal Assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. I stayed in that job throughout the war.

"My job got me right into the inside of everything, including all the most secret affairs. I couldn't possibly have had a more exciting or interesting War. Of course, it's my experience in Naval Intelligence, and what I learned about secret operations of one sort or another, that finally led me to write about them---in a highly bowdlerized way---with James Bond as the central figure."

7289

There will never be another .....

THANKS!

Loeffelholz

Cheers! {[]

...I think I've pretty much mined the interview for everything, now...the only story left untold is his already well-known Birds of the West Indies tale.

Here's how Fleming finishes the interview, which seems quite fitting:

"I do write for money---but also for pleasure. I'm very glad that people say kind things about my books---because, naturally, if they didn't say so, I shouldn't make any money, and consequently I shouldn't enjoy the writing so much. I think that communicating enjoyment is certainly a very good achievement, even in the fairly modest seam of literature that comprises thriller writing. But it's true that I write below my ultimate capacity---or at least I think I probably do. If I really settled down and decided to write a War and Peace among thrillers, if I shut myself up and decided to do this and nothing else, I daresay I might bring it off, if such a thing is possible. There's a great deal of violence and sex in all great novels, so I dare say if I tried to do it in the modern vein I might conceivably succeed.

"But I'm more interested in action than in celebration, and I should think that the great War and Peace thriller would be more likely to be written by Graham Greene or Georges Simenon, because either of them would do it more truthfully and accurately than I ever could. I enjoy exaggeration and things larger than life. It amuses me to have a villain with a great bulbous head, whereas, as you know, they're generally little people with nothing at all extraordinary-looking about them. Then, too, I'm afraid I shouldn't be able to write in sufficient depth to make this hypothetical thriller stand up as a classic...

"I'm too interested in surface things, and I'm too interested in maintaining a fast pace, in writing at speed. I'm afraid I shouldn't have the patience to delve into the necessary psychological background. But in the end, I must say, I'm very happy writing as I do. And I greatly enjoy knowing that other people, quite intelligent people, find my books amusing and entertaining. But I'm not really surprised, because they entertain and amuse me, too."

:007)

7289

Loeffelholz wrote:

"It amuses me to have a villain with a great bulbous head, whereas, as you know, they're generally little people with nothing at all extraordinary-looking about them."

It's almost as if Fleming had looked into the future and seen QOS and it's villain Dominic Greene. Fleming's comments on the "Classic Thriller" vs. his own style of writing get to the heart of what makes up an oo7 adventure.

After reading his Fleming's comments it would seem that after all that QOS was a very Flemingist Film, prehaps only lacking a villain with an overstuffed head!



PS:

We were all cheated by IF's premature death. Imagine what his "Classic Ultimate Thriller" might have been. I for one KNOW Fleming had the talent, expierence and skill to have pulled it off!

Red Indian

The thing that I really liked about both Mikkelson and Almaric is their "reptillian" appearance. Mikkelson more so in the mouth and Almaric in the eyes. I found them both to be a lot more believable than any of the villains from the previous films.

Didn't Fleming use the term reptillian to describe a baddie in one of the novels? I'm willing to bet that was a factor for the producers in casting both of them.

"But in the end, I must say, I'm very happy writing as I do. And I greatly enjoy knowing that other people, quite intelligent people, find my books amusing and entertaining. But I'm not really surprised, because they entertain and amuse me, too."

And we all thank you Commander! {[]

craig_jakarta

thank u for the article mr.Loeffelholz:

after read the article, it makes me positively agree that Daniel Craig is the closest of Flemming James Bond. specially when Flemming said about the character:

I quite agree that he's not a person of much social attractiveness. But then, I didn't intend for him to be a particularly likable person. He's a cipher, a blunt instrument in the hands of government.

So i hope Daniel Craig will make another 3 or more movies{[]

Loeffelholz

craig_jakarta wrote:

thank u for the article mr.Loeffelholz:

after read the article, it makes me positively agree that Daniel Craig is the closest of Flemming James Bond. specially when Flemming said about the character:

I quite agree that he's not a person of much social attractiveness. But then, I didn't intend for him to be a particularly likable person. He's a cipher, a blunt instrument in the hands of government.

You're certainly welcome, Mr. jakarta! {[] I'm very pleased that the article is still being read and enjoyed; it was my intention to provide our Bond fans as much of Mr. Fleming's own perspective as possible.

j.blades

great job Loeffelholz, its always a treat to see how the creater of bond's view on things are, and to read first hand ian fleming writting about himself, which is sort of as if he were writting of bond, thankyou again, a pleasure to read and re read.

cheers -{