A VIEW TO A
DAVE:
by David Alexander
People seem to
think I have a James Bond complex. They want to know if I'm carrying a Walther
PPK in my hip pocket, or they ask if my car's equipped with an ejector seat.
They want to know, if I'm really from Brooklyn, where I got that "British
accent" from, and when I tell them it's a Brooklyn accent (albeit twice or
thrice removed) they say, come on, stop kidding me -- maybe you got it on Her
Majesty's Secret Kings County Service, huh?
While it's true
that unlike some Brooklyn-born authors -- and I'm thinking specifically of
Irwin Shaw here, who carried the Brogue to his grave (even in his latter years
living in a chalet high in the Swiss Alps) -- I tried to chuck the Brogue at
an early age, principally as a byproduct of trying to lose what I viewed then
as my rather embarrassing provincialism, by traveling to Europe and elsewhere,
and then discovering I had people in London whom I could badger until
they let me stay. Truthfully, my English relatives are the least of the
connections that have, again and again brought me back to the UK, which is the
country I've spent most time in than anyplace besides the good ole USA. I've
walked the length and breadth of London, and have at least once even given a
London cab driver directions (and a shortcut) to an address in the City, which
is, I believe, a feat that even Bond himself could never accomplish.
Anyway, my
digression serves a purpose, which is to lead me back to the supposed subject
of this little bit of autobiography: my so-called James Bond complex. I don't
really have one, anymore than I have an ejector seat in my Aston Martin (that
was a joke, it's not that make). James Bond, after all, isn't a real
person, and only a lunatic would try to be a fictitious person, the flight of
a writer's fancy. Nevertheless, I will admit without blushing that I've always
tried in some ways to be like a real-life person, the author who created the
Bond character, Ian Fleming.
Having
recently, and after a fairly long absence, reread Fleming in Ian Fleming
(Octopus; 1980), a volume of collected works that contain all the Bond books
(the only books besides Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a children's book, and some
miscellaneous travel books, that Fleming ever wrote) to make sure that my
early impressions of Fleming weren't unduly influenced by the furtive thrills
of reading about titillating things Bond did with the assorted femme fatales,
seductresses and others of that sort he ran into in the course of
devil-may-care derring-do and gentlemanly espionage (like biting their "Mount
of Venus," whatever the hell that is), my impression remains that Fleming is
one of the major inventors of modern action-espionage thrillers, and an author
whom others, without, to my knowledge, paying him even lip service by way of
recognition of this fact, have very deliberately styled themselves after.
Ian Fleming is also a bridge between the early definers of the international
intrigue and action-suspense genres and the authors who followed him. The
characters and situations that have become characteristically associated with
the Bond cycle existed in the category before Fleming came along.
Authors like E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Richard Harding Davis, to say nothing
of Wilkie Collins, developed many of them in prototype -- and made themselves
famous as a result. Oppenheim, for example, practically invented the
baccarat-playing bad guy with an eye patch in a white tux high-rolling through
the posh salons of Monte Carlo -- with a handy yacht anchored offshore from
which his nefarious henchmen could sally forth to do evil things in the dead
of night. Bondian heroes were embryonically present in those pages as well.
Oppenheim invented what might be termed the "Casino Royale concept" at the
turn of the twentieth century, long before Fleming picked it up again and
modernized it (1954). Let me boast for a moment that I was fortunate to
have stumbled upon the complete works of both Oppenheim and Davis in first
edition form some time ago, and could read them in the original (many of their
works are available free through the Gutenberg Project, though.) With this
having been said, let me add that Fleming's further development of the
literary prototypes of earlier authors was in the best literary tradition; to
paraphrase Shakespeare, he bettered the instruction of a series of
predecessors.
The names of those authors who've since tried to write in the Fleming mold
should be obvious to readers of the categories. I don't include Eric Ambler,
who was a contemporary and colleague of Fleming's, and is even mentioned in
From Russia With Love (1957), in which Fleming has Bond take a volume of
Ambler's along for the ride behind the Iron Curtain on the Orient-Express to
help while away the long hours of traveling and womanizing. Many of those
authors who have studied Fleming but only acknowledged the influence of Ambler
have probably had good reason for not having given Fleming his due.
For one thing, Fleming died young and before his time. For another, the Bond
movies effectively overshadowed the books, which seemed to pale by comparison
to the sound and fury of the cinematic portrayals. The fact that he'd sold all
the rights -- lock, stock and barrel -- to the Bond film production team
didn't help matters either. For yet another, and perhaps more seriously, some
of Fleming's otherwise excellent writing seems dated; worse yet, much of it is
laced with a casual sexism and racism that worked when the books were written
but now seem singularly offensive. This is not to say that Fleming was alone
in his denigrations of women, minorities and in his apotheosizing the white
Anglo-Saxon male as a being superior to all others. He wasn't. His
contemporaries and predecessors in the US and UK are just as guilty of such
sins.
These include Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, James T.
Farrell, James Joyce, and a host of others as well or lesser-known who, as an
English major, I was expected to revere in college, and who are still held up
in lit classes today as icons of literary style and masters of craftsmanship.
(Curiously, I find that "tough guy" writers Dashiell Hammet and Raymond
Chandler stand out as extremely non-sexist and non-racist by comparison,
probably because the two of them actually interacted with women and minorities
on a daily basis and on professional levels instead of inventing characters
amid the rarified circumstances of a self-styled and expatriate "Lost
Generation." To digress further, I find Zelda Fitzgerald's
semi-autobiographical Save Me The Waltz, which has been derided by many, to be
a minor tour de force.
Anyway, my point, and I hope one well-taken, is that Fleming, while a product
of his place, time and social milieu, remains today an author still worth
reading. Apart from being a master of mood, Fleming produces sometimes
astonishing passages that while accurately depicting a particular scene, at
the same time convey an appropriately creepy miasma of danger, lurking evil,
the very presence of imminent doom, whose paranoia creeps into the mind of the
captive reader. Ambler has a gift for this as well, but Fleming is just as
good when he gets rolling, such as he does in depictions of the gypsy camp and
scenes of Yugoslavia behind the Iron Curtain in From Russia with Love.
Another of Fleming's strong points lies in his depiction of the Bondian hero,
which differs considerably from the movie version exemplified by Sean Connery
and others, acted from scripts penned by several, but notably by Richard
Maibaum. It seems to me that action heros break down into two basic, and very
ancient types. I'd call these, on the one hand, the Achilles type, and, on the
other hand, the Ulysses or Odysseus type, taken, of course, from the Iliad and
Odyssey of Homer.
The Achilles
type could be described as the classically macho warrior who prevails
primarily by might of main. The Ulysses type, on the other hand, while capable
of the most deliberate and calculated violence when called for -- such as in
the final scene of the Odyssey, where the returning Ulysses cold-bloodedly
wipes out a palace full of slimy suitors out to purloin his Penelope --
prefers to use cunning whenever possible, and is only brawny by default. "I am
No Man," Ulysses said to the Cyclops, and thereby brought about the escape of
himself and his crew. Bond, as originally created by Fleming, exemplified the
Ulysses type of action hero. An example can be seen in the difference between
Bond's portrayals vis-a-vis the evil Odd Job in the book and movie versions of
Goldfinger.
In Fleming's
original portrayal, Bond realizes pretty much from the outset that he's no
match physically for Odd Job, whom Bond takes for granted can beat him in a
fight. In order to take Odd Job out in the book's final scenes, Bond resorts
to a last-ditch stratagem or dodge -- sitting beside Odd Job on a
high-altitude jet, Bond shatters the airtight window resulting in Odd Job's
being sucked out into the void. In the movie, of course, there was a
knock-down drag-out fight in Fort Knox, whereas doing away with Goldfinger's
villainous henchman by sucking him out into the vacuum was reserved for the
considerably less formidable Goldfinger himself during the latter's attempted
getaway.
Fleming's other
main failing is his frequently resorting to rather facile deus-ex-machina
stratagems, better worthy of Inspector Clousseau than a top-flight action
hero, to get Bond out of tight places and wrap up the books. In Doctor No
(1958), for example, Fleming has Bond escape becoming a tasty morsel for No's
pet giant squid by plunging a diver's spear into its eye -- naturally the
thirty-foot squid's sucker-festooned tentacles, which are on the point of
crushing Bond to death, instantly let go -- yeah, sure. A little later, Bond
wraps things up by sneaking up on Dr. No with a big hopper full of bird guano
(No's secret lair is on a guano island off the coast of Jamaica, shades of
Lord Jim) dangling from the business-end of a giant construction crane, and
burying the evil doctor (as in "I been a frikkin' evil doctor for the last
frikkin' thirty years, OH-KAY!) under a ton of -- well, I guess you'd pretty
much have to call it shit.
On the other
hand, many another writer's been guilty of the same sin -- beginning, I might
add, with the immortal Homer whose "I am No Man" ploy in the Odyssey always
struck me as being so frikkin' evil doctor stupid that even the dumbest
Cyclops wouldn't be expected to have fallen for it, let alone Polyphemus, king
of his one-eyed breed. Only the strange people I had as professors in my many
classics classes in college seemed to think this kind of junk represented the
art of plotting at its zenith of perfection, but then again, you know what
they say about classics professors. (Well, maybe you don't, but I'm not going
to say it here.) Anyway, in my humble opinion the foregoing is more than
balanced by Fleming's introduction of the literary device of having the action
hero evade the clutches of the bad guy and his evil henchmen by finding a
handy ventilation shaft, crawling into same, evading pursuit (despite many
hardships and dangers) and re-emerging to counterattack and win the day. The
invention of what might be called "the old ventilation shaft ploy" has been
the saving grace of a thousand books and movies that have followed in train.
It's a plot device that's been used in one form or another in almost every
action flick ever made (viz. every "Die Hard," for example.)
But, to conclude; even if I did in fact have a James Bond complex, it might
not turn out to be the worst thing. After all, Bond is a gentleman, is
knowledgeable about fine wine and haute cuisine and beautiful women fly to him
like moths to a flame. He doesn't curse, dresses well, yet is capable of
beating the living crap out of punks and smartass bad guys from rank goons to
those slickly noxious "sharpies of the underworld" that used to be referred to
in the slogan of every teaser that began every Kojack episode. And, oh yes,
Bond is always on the side of civilization over anarchy. Let's not forget
about that. Yeah -- you could definitely say that in light of said foregoing
respects, Dave is every inch a Fleming, and in fact, in one or two other
particulars I can think of, maybe even a couple of inches a Bond.
Copyright (C) 2011 David Alexander. All rights reserved.