Book review

The New York Times has a review of The Man With The Golden Typewriter, about Ian Fleming:

Ian Fleming adored women, fast cars, golf, martinis, and cards, and he cheerfully assigned these same hobbies to his most famous fictional creation, Agent 007. But The Man With the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters is much less about Fleming’s glamorous cavorting than it is about his brazen hustle to become a famous commercial novelist. This will come as a disappointment, perhaps, to anyone who dives into this collection and expects an orgy of vice. But to anyone who has ever worked on a book, writing one, editing one, marketing one, publishing one, or, heck, even just reading one, this volume is a giant stalk of catnip.
Open to almost any page and you’ll find something irresistible. My favorite exchanges are those between Fleming and two of his most trusted readers, William Plomer and Daniel George, to whom he sent early drafts of each Bond installment. While they almost always found something wonderful to say— “I got so fond of Dr. No, I was quite sorry to see him vanish under a mound of excreta,” Plomer wrote in 1957— they were positively unsparing in their critiques of Fleming’s stylistic tics and idiosyncrasies. There isn’t space to list them all, but here’s a modest sampling:

“I don’t think M ought so often to speak ‘drily.’”
“Shoulder-shrugging, I regret to say, is too much in evidence.”
“On some pages the sentences all begin with ‘And.’ I can’t see the point of this. Presumably you are aiming at producing an effect of panting continuity. Take out all the ‘Ands’ and see if it makes any difference.”

Plomer also offered more practical criticisms, noting how improbable it was that a fly-button would be the first thing to dislodge from Bond’s pants as he lay spread-eagle on a saw table, a circular blade whirring toward his groin. (A memorable scene in Goldfinger.) “Didn’t other objects get in the way first,” Plomer asked, “or does Bond have undescended testicles?”
The letters in The Man With the Golden Typewriter are, for the most part, organized chronologically, with each batch corresponding to the evolution and reception of a different Bond novel. (Fleming wrote these Bond books with depressing rapidity, in just two-month spurts at his Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye.)
Fergus Fleming, Ian’s nephew and an author in his own right, writes the introduction and serves as the collection’s Jeeves throughout, providing his services when droll and illuminating context is required, but otherwise quietly stepping out of the way.
From the start, the reader knows that Fleming will not be an easy customer. After one of his earliest meetings with his publisher, Jonathan Cape, Fleming sent him a note hinting that higher royalty rates than they’d discussed might be nice, as would a first print run of ten thousand copies, an awfully high number for a first-time author. His postscript: “I return William’s report, which doesn’t give me many hints on improving my style. Presumably this means it is already impeccable.”
Cape should have expected it. Fleming was both the foreign manager of The Sunday Times of London and the director of Queen Anne Press at the time. He was, to a publisher, what Philip Roth would likely be to a psychoanalyst: the nightmare client who knows the tricks of the trade better than the experts.
Fleming’s haggling notes about print runs and royalties continue through the first quarter of this volume, and they’re a study in dash, self-deprecation, and passive-aggression, all rolled into one. (On discovering that a fellow writer at the same publishing house had a better deal: “This,” he wrote, “was a severe blow to my amour propre.”)
Time would, of course, prove Fleming right. His publishers should have backed him heavily from the start. As his fame waxed, his correspondents grew more diverse, including not just his editors and literary friends (Noël Coward, W. Somerset Maugham, and Raymond Chandler), but also legions of critics, fans, nit-pickers, and self-appointed fact checkers.
The fact-checking notes are a revelation. Before the hawk-eyed age of the Internet, readers had to use snail-mail for their chiding missives pointing out an author’s mistakes, and Fleming received some lulus. Several women rebuked Fleming for incorrectly attributing the manufacture of Vent Vert perfume to Dior, rather than Balmain. Some fellow censured him for outfitting the Orient Express with hydraulic brakes, rather than vacuum ones. French speakers wrote to correct his French; German speakers wrote to correct his German; Herman W. Liebert, a librarian at Yale, complained he’d implausibly stuffed Anglicisms into the mouths of Americans: “A list of alternate readings is enclosed. A few are optional, most are not.” (Fleming was so impressed he sent Liebert an early manuscript of The Spy Who Loved Me, beseeching him to go to town.)
Then came the letter about the gun. In his first Bond books, Fleming had armed 007 with a .25 Beretta. “This sort of gun is really a lady’s gun,” wrote one Geoffrey Boothroyd of Glasgow, Scotland in 1956, “and not a really nice lady at that.” It turns out that Boothroyd knew his stuff; he and Fleming became friends; and Bond was promptly equipped with his famous Walther PPK.
To his admirers and even his scalding critics, Fleming was unfailingly charming and assured. Occasionally, though, Fleming’s notes to his friends contained more than a whiff of self-doubt, which lends this lively and entertaining collection more poignancy than you might expect. “Probably the fault of my books is that I don’t take them seriously enough, and meekly accept having my head ragged off about them,” he wrote to Raymond Chandler in April of 1956. “If one has a grain of intelligence it is difficult to go on being serious about a character like James Bond. You, after all, write ‘novels of suspense’, if not sociological studies, whereas my books are straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.”
These doubts, alas, fitfully haunted Fleming until he died of a heart attack in 1964 at the age of 56. But his admirers should know he remained a sybarite, even in his waning days. After his first heart attack in 1961, he wrote to Christopher Soames, Britain’s Minister of Agriculture, hoping to determine “the finest liquor obtainable in England,” now that he was condemned to a mere three ounces a day. “I am so sorry to bother you with this picayune enquiry,” he closed, “but it is just conceivable that you may also be interested in the reply.”

Rico says he'll get the book from the library...

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