Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--was, more than anything, the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. By inventing the parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. In The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs of his own fandom while illuminating what Bond says about sex, the monarchy, food, class, attitudes toward America, and everything in between. The result is an insightful and, above all, entertaining exploration of postwar Britain under the influence of the legendary Agent 007.
Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--was, more than anything, the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. By inventing the parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. In The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs of his own fandom while illuminating what Bond says about sex, the monarchy, food, class, attitudes toward America, and everything in between. The result is an insightful and, above all, entertaining exploration of postwar Britain under the influence of the legendary Agent 007.
The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond
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Overview
Bond. James Bond. The ultimate British hero--suave, stoic, gadget-driven--was, more than anything, the necessary invention of a traumatized country whose self-image as a great power had just been shattered by the Second World War. By inventing the parallel world of secret British greatness and glamour, Ian Fleming fabricated an icon that has endured long past its maker's death. In The Man Who Saved Britain, Simon Winder lovingly and ruefully re-creates the nadirs of his own fandom while illuminating what Bond says about sex, the monarchy, food, class, attitudes toward America, and everything in between. The result is an insightful and, above all, entertaining exploration of postwar Britain under the influence of the legendary Agent 007.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429923712 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/02/2007 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 327 KB |
About the Author
Simon Winder is the editor of several anthologies, including the highly praised Night Thoughts. He works in publishing and lives in London.
Simon Winder is the author of the highly praised The Man Who Saved Britain and a trilogy of books about the history of Central Europe--the Sunday Times (London) Top Ten Bestseller Germania, Danubia, and Lotharingia. He works in publishing and lives in Wandsworth Town, London.
Read an Excerpt
The Man Who Saved Britain
A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond
By Simon Winder
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2006 Simon WinderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2371-2
CHAPTER 1
"NIGHT AND DAY"
MY MOTHER used to tell me how her clearest early memory was of sitting on the front step of her family's house in South-East London, aged six, eating a honey sandwich and watching as planes zoomed over her head, engaged in fighting the Battle of Britain. I often think of that encounter and the thousands of times I had gazed at my mother who had in turn gazed at one of the defining moments in the world's history, but who was as much concerned with the taste of the honey as with the Spitfires.
My grandmother — my mother's mother — experienced the War and specifically the Blitz quite differently: as terror piled on terror. She still talks today with incredulity of the three months during which every night brought an air raid, of giving birth during a raid, of the people and houses randomly annihilated around her own neighbourhood. She and my mother (safely tucked up for the rest of the War on a farm) both remembered too a world substantially without men — of families filled with missing sons, brothers and fathers, of a country which by 1945 had some four and a half million men in uniform scattered around the world.
Every country's recent history provides different forms of trauma. It is absolutely the case that the British experience of the Second World War was not remotely as horrible as that of Poland, say, or Russia. There was not the physical annihilation experienced by Ukraine or even anything approaching the subtle but acrid horror of occupation undergone by France or Burma. The 300,000 or so British dead matches roughly the American figure, although the latter was almost exclusively military whereas the British was about a fifth civilian. In the scarcely credible cauldron of the War these are tiny figures, swamped by — say — the Bengal Famine alone.
But just as the death of a patient in the next hospital bed has no serious bearing on an individual's own dangerous and invasive operation, so Britain's "benign" War experience was in the end completely traumatic and terrible. Indeed the whole idea of the "good war" has been developed to generate both a sense of moral certainty that was in practice under siege for much of the conflict and to allow those who experienced the War to hide their eyes from the vast gulfs that had surrounded them.
Fundamentally the War, despite its being won, consisted for Britain of a ceaseless nightly Blitz of humiliations, compromises and setbacks, and these did not stop with 1945 but kept up a relentless battering until well into the 1970s. The country that reeled into the European Economic Community in 1973 was, with Ireland, the poorest member state, an ashen, provincial, polyester sort of country, no longer recognizable as the victor of 1945 and a million miles from the self-image British people had nurtured for themselves for generations.
The strange obsession Britain has with the Second World War, now almost unique in the world (with the interesting exception of Russia), has profound roots, therefore: it was the last point at which there had been a deep sense of purpose and value, crystallizing around the two peaks of the Battle of Britain and D-Day and forgetful of the horrible failures that otherwise marked much of the War experience. The pace at which Britain then "decompressed," from being the triumphant victor over Germany and Japan and the world's largest empire in 1945 to being a shorn, flailing, International Monetary Fund beggar in 1976, perched resentfully on the fringe of Europe, makes an extraordinary story. Most countries en route to such a debacle would have stirred themselves to shoot a few of their rulers or organize a Latin American–style coup. This was certainly the traditional European approach, whether in Berlin, Vienna, Paris or Moscow. But somehow in Britain the revolutionary left were never more than a fringe of a fringe and there was never a faintly plausible caudillo waiting in the wings (even the comic/sinister Lord Mountbatten turned down such an idea).
There were many reasons for Britain's different fate, but none in themselves seem quite enough: an unprovokable sense of deference; the food; the weather; the quality of BBC programming (if you took to the streets you might miss something good); a non-political police and civil service (or at least non-political in comparison with most European countries). These were immensely fraught, febrile decades with almost every year loading on further shame and chaos, handled by a political class in thrall to history, exhausted and embittered. But through that devastated landscape walked a fascinating, symptomatic figure — the totem or lucky charm: James Bond.
Before laying out some suggestions as to how we should see the Second World War and its aftermath, it is important — or at least quite interesting — to get to grips a little with Bond's remarkable creator.
WHAT SORT OF a man was Ian Fleming? What do we need to know about him to understand his creation? Thanks to his photo sessions with Cecil Beaton and Horst Tappe he has left an indelible image. Many writers are associated with smoking in their most iconic portraits (Auden, Simenon, Camus — the last's image more compelling surely than mere social pressures as a reason for lighting up), but none with smoke itself. Fleming's skin, textured like that of a giant tortoise, is almost hidden by smoke in Tappe's late photos: indeed there is so much smoke that it is as though his neck has caught fire. The weirdly compelling, flat, contemptuous face, the clenched teeth on the cigarette holder, the mean, shadowed eyes, all seem to imply a man of ferocious purpose. Tappe's saurian anti-smoking ad is one of the essential icons of the early 1960s. Reproduced on millions of Pan paperback covers — overlaid with such lovely quotes as "Brrr ... how wincingly well Mr. Fleming writes" and "Muscularly brilliant ... not for prudes" — the photo implies less that Fleming is Bond than that he is himself a sort of criminal mastermind — a coughing version of Blofeld.
And yet in other, less widely used photos the effect is less happy. In one bizarre session Fleming is shown looking down the sight of a revolver, the gun-barrel pointing at the camera, looming and massively distorted. He looks like a dotty old novelist camping it up, which of course he was. Rather than arranging with a nod of the head for some merciless killing, dropping into place one more bloodstained piece in some vast jigsaw of terror understood only by himself, Fleming was in reality merely tapping out nonsense on his portable typewriter in Jamaica whilst slurping cocktails and muttering querulously about socialism.
After their deaths almost all writers are remembered by photos taken late in life. Pictures of them when younger, when indeed they may have written their most memorable books, always seem to appear as unrealistic previews for the crumpled or craggy later versions. Shaw, Tolkien, Beckett, Waugh are doomed always to be wonky and gnarled. Accident has spared us the spectacle of the frog-like, scrumpled property billionaire Camus enjoying a joke with his friend President Chirac. Pictures of the younger Fleming, without the thousands of impacts from drinking, smoking and matrimonial screaming matches, have no real plausibility. He looks as he was: a handsome but banal philandering toff; self-confident but only through staying within the vast ramparts of class disdain; intelligent but only because the usual arbitrary scraps of elite education had stuck to him. In fact he is very much like Bond, but minus the action and adventure and plus the golfing chums.
Before the War, all the interest attached to his remarkable brother Peter, journalist, adventurer, hero author of the magical News from Tartary and Brazilian Adventure. Indeed Ian Fleming was almost a parody of a less talented younger brother. Clearly his family upbringing was surprising and interesting — because it produced Peter Fleming — but there didn't seem enough left in the bag for anyone else.
HOW SHOULD WE understand the past? Historians have to create a coherent narrative (the meaning, after all, of the word "history"), but inevitably this creates limits and frustrations. The past does not roll out like a motorway building project. People often do not notice what is going on — they are too tired, too old, too young, too stupid, looking in the other direction. Inevitably history becomes what the historian chooses to point out. History is also, of course, hindsight — each event lived then as a set of choices blurred by prejudice, greed, panic and habit tidied into a plausible sequence.
Countries can become very crowded with history, and the British national obsession with it should tell us much more about the nature of what has happened to us — and continues to happen to us — than it does. The merely folkloric or picturesque historical interests of many countries and the careful aphasia of others show that history itself will deal a great range of cards which different nations either pore over or discard. Britain is a country with so much "live" history that it sometimes threatens to engulf it.
However defined, historical events broke into twentieth-century British lives in highly disturbing ways, where the blameless private unfolding of family stories and the grand narratives of the two world wars intersect. Through the timing of births my family was almost unaffected, beyond the mysterious death of a great-uncle in Ceylon while in the RAF. Other families' timings and decisions could result in their being ravaged to pieces by the dates 1914–18 and 1939–45, with mere fragments stepping into what proved to be the post-war world. Fleming for example had, just before his ninth birthday, to hear that his father (a dashing friend of Churchill's and a Conservative MP) had been killed on the Western Front. In the Second World War a brother was killed in action and a long-term girlfriend killed by a bomb in London. For very good reasons we put such terrible information aside all year except on Remembrance Sunday. What is for many a day of pleasing, attenuated melancholy is for millions completely unbearable.
LOOKING AT Fleming's life in the 1930s I feel a little Red commissar inside me thumping his desk and waving around a revolver. The sheer imbecile levels of privilege, the thoughtlessness, the parasitism are astounding. Fleming wandered through life as a sort of walking reproach to capitalism as a rational system based on competitive Darwinian struggle. In many cradles of European civilization it had been okay for at least a hundred and fifty years to carve up people like Fleming and set fire to their mansions as a legitimate form of central heating. Somehow in Britain they survived. Robert Fleming & Co., the bank from which the family fortunes derived, was at the heart of a vast spider-web of imperial interests, from Anglo- Texan cattle millionaires to Anglo-Iranian Oil, the company that later became BP. Around the world many thousands of people were toiling in effect for the bank to create an awesome, dazzling, infinitely complex structure which had lurking in it somewhere a little up escalator for the fortunate Ian Fleming.
After leaving Eton he mucked about in the army for a bit, spent some time in the Alps at a special type of school, worked for a while at Reuters news agency, got a job as a stockbroker because his mother knew the Governor of the Bank of England ... You expect a scene like the climactic moment in the great film of Frankenstein where the enraged villagers all rush along, yelling and waving flaming torches, intent on burning everything down. When he's not shooting stags he's flying to France to play golf, when he's not skiing in Austria he's leafing through imported French pornography in his bachelor pad. A serialized, strip-cartoon version run in a Soviet children's newspaper would have been spurned by its young readers as crudely implausible.
It is this British upper-class imperviousness between the Wars which is now so striking. The civil wars in Ireland and Spain, the street-fighting and hatreds sprawling throughout Europe, the quintessential newsreel image of the era of tiny male figures in hats and overcoats running in panic down ornate chilly boulevards: these are all held at bay. The unfolding horrors of Nazi Germany and the USSR had no resonance outside an ineffectual British fringe on right and left who never seriously threatened or even perturbed a ruling-class core who, behind the bluff, pipe-smoking fraud of Stanley Baldwin and his "National" government, could weather epic levels of unemployment, colonial unrest and even a king's abdication.
Fleming effortlessly floats along on all this, working his way through endless specially made cigarettes and upper-class women. Of course, in the end everyone has to be grateful. Britain spends the 1930s in effect manipulating or using up a tremendous range of international assets, exploiting its weakening but still key role in finance, emigration and trade to cushion itself against some of the worst aspects of the Depression. This sense in which Britain was using itself up would become cruelly apparent in 1940 but until that point was reached — a point neither wished for nor imagined by anyone in the whole population — there was a stability which, as scared or angry crowds surged through Barcelona or Paris or Vienna, is extraordinary. And if this stability was bought at the price of a few thousand Ian Flemings then that was surely an acceptable price. The communist or fascist critiques of European capitalism had a validity in many countries but only a very limited one in Britain. Nobody really wanted Buckingham Palace to become People's Sausage Factory No. 1 and the palace's painfully feeble-minded and marginal inhabitants were never in the least danger. Nobody even, on the approved Continental model, took a shot at them or waved around a dagger of retribution. British capitalism and society retained immense reserves, however pressured. Indeed, it could be claimed that the solidity of the British system, based on a great global framework of money and language of astonishing resilience and complexity, of which the island itself was merely a focus point, was perhaps always unbeatable by Germany: itself an isolated and almost landlocked piece of a small continent with no global reach of any serious kind at all.
This sort of solidity or stolidity which shaped Fleming's whole world and the country around him was both impressive and distasteful in almost equal measure. The foam-flecked mouth of my internal Red commissar can quite readily be bought off by a nice cream tea at a National Trust property. No critique of Britain's life, even one as cruelly intelligent as, say, George Orwell's, could come up with a means of creating some level of social justice without risking the terrifying fate of Russia or Germany. It was only in the fleeting moment of triumph in 1945 that a timid but thoughtful bid could be made to overhaul the status quo but, as we shall see, this was rapidly tamed and rechanneled by the same huge forces that kept Britain, at great moral cost, safe in the 1930s.
The immediate and completely frightening nature of the great emergency of 1939 is overwhelmingly coloured by our knowing what happened (we survived) and this gives a specific narrative flavour now not enjoyed then. Identifying these distortions can in effect be a definition of an entire kind of history, far more than some plodding re-re-recounting of events. If Fleming spent the 1930s for the most part mucking around, there were others who were grey with anxiety.
IN A WORLD Saturated with media and with Internet access to a welter of images, each historical period reinforces even further its dominant flavour: Louis XV's must always be crowded with terrific cloaks, hats, dresses and swordpommels even if in practice it was more usual to be dead in a ditch; the Mogul court was a magically refined place, but undoubtedly filled with many hundreds more vigorous individuals than the two or three seated, poised with small flowers held between their fingers, favoured by some of its painters. This is particularly cruelly the case around the lead-up to the Second World War.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Man Who Saved Britain by Simon Winder. Copyright © 2006 Simon Winder. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Epigraph,
Introduction - Eating Old Jamaica at the Tunbridge Wells Odeon,
Chapter One - "NIGHT AND DAY",
Chapter Two - THE STUFFED COBRA,
Chapter Three - CORONATION CHICKEN,
Chapter Four - MANAGED DECLINE,
Chapter Five - "CHAMPAGNE AND BENZEDRINE! NEVER AGAIN",
Chapter Six - THE BEATLES WITH EARMUFFS,
Chapter Seven - SWEAT AND POLYESTER,
Chapter Eight - AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF VIOLENCE,
Conclusion - TWO WALKS,
Note - Books and Films,
EDITED BY SIMON WINDER,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
Copyright Page,