There is a moment in Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography of Ian Fleming in which one of the James Bond author’s female friends, not conquests, is quoted as saying that he harbored the ambition to be “the Renaissance ideal, the Complete Man.” Shakespeare has taken the second part of this for the subtitle of his study. But how to paint the whole picture of the complete man when Fleming was, according to his last lover, “so many people,” a mass of multiple personalities and conflicting characteristics? As his biographer notes in his introduction, “It is not an exaggeration to say there were even more Ian Flemings than there are actors who have played Bond.”
Ian Fleming: The Complete Man attempts to peel back the layers, debunk the myths, and make sense of the contradictions. This was a man who, over the course of his life, was a journalist, banker, stockbroker, intelligence officer, and, in his last 12 years, thriller writer. Some found him kind, charming, and outgoing, others cruel, rude, and withdrawn. Shakespeare reels off oxymorons: Fleming was “a playboy puritan,” “a loner who needed a group,” and “an ultra-conservative who was a non-conformist.” In addition, he was a bon vivant, a book collector, a scuba diver, and, for one wartime associate, “a ladies’ man par excellence” — a trait, of course, shared by his famous fictional creation. Shakespeare’s magisterial book shines a light on Fleming, a man of many parts, while tracing Bond’s trajectory from humble hero to cultural phenomenon.
The book begins with the rags-to-riches backstory of Fleming’s Scottish grandfather, who, as a banker, became one of the richest men in Europe. Fleming’s upbringing was therefore privileged but also largely loveless. Born in 1908, he barely knew his father, Valentine, who was killed in battle on the Western Front. And he found his mother, Eve, to be ruthless and domineering. His miserable school years at Eton (where he excelled at athletics but little else) and his military training at Sandhurst were cut short after what Shakespeare calls “trouble over the ladies.”
In a desperate bid to make her errant son respectable, Eve packed Fleming off to Austria, where family friends took him under their wing and tutored him for the foreign office exam. He failed it and torpedoed his prospects of a career as a diplomat. However, his European education gave him fluency in different languages and a degree of self-confidence and purpose, all of which helped him in the job he did manage to secure as a Reuters correspondent. The position informed the man he was to become in several ways, from honing a style of writing that, he once said, “damned well had to be neat and correct and concise and vivid” to covering a show trial in Russia that opened his eyes to the world of espionage.
After changing professions and spending six years in the financial heart of London, Fleming was admitted into the secret realm. Throughout World War II, as personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence, he was in the spy game, a key player who stalked corridors of power and forged alliances with influential figures. In 1942, while attending an Anglo-American naval conference in Jamaica, he was so enraptured by his exotic surroundings that he made a cast-iron future plan: At the end of “this blasted war,” he told a friend, he would live on the island “and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.”
Fleming made good on his promise, buying a winter retreat — Goldeneye. It was in Jamaica in 1952 that he turned his life around. He married Ann Charteris, with whom he had had an affair and caused a scandal back home, and he wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale. The marriage became, in Shakespeare’s words, “as toxic as an unripe akee,” with husband and wife eventually reverting to their old ways and pursuing other romantic entanglements. The book, on the other hand, was a resounding success and led to Fleming following a rigid routine and delivering a new 007 adventure on a yearly basis. Fans of the series included John F. Kennedy (and, for that matter, Lee Harvey Oswald), along with Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, two producers who snapped up the film rights and one day came calling. The rest is cinematic history.
Fleming only lived long enough to see the first two Bond films. He enjoyed his literary fame until a lethargy set in (“How the keys creak as I type & I fear the zest may have gone”) and illness took hold. “I’d swap the whole damned thing for a healthy heart,” he told a friend, but his consumption of 70 cigarettes a day and the stress of a plagiarism case concerning the novel Thunderball had already caused irreparable damage. He was 56 when his heart finally gave out in 1964.
Weighing in at over 800 pages, this account of Fleming’s life covers a lot of ground, often in very fine detail. Shakespeare reveals that the Fleming Estate gave him access to a cache of hitherto unseen family papers. By delving into this archive and conducting his own research, he has produced the most thorough biography of Fleming yet.
There are gaps, though. Until all relevant documents are declassified, a lot of Fleming’s exploits in intelligence will remain shrouded in secrecy. Nevertheless, Shakespeare is keen to stress the “scope and significance” of his subject’s war work and does so by expanding on what is known (such as Fleming masterminding a covert unit of intelligence-gathering commandos) and analyzing what has been rumored (Fleming being one of three main spearheads behind the creation of the OSS, precursor to the CIA). Through the murk and mystery, what becomes clear is that Fleming was no lowly deskman involved only with “in-trays, out-trays, and ashtrays.”
Equally patchy is Shakespeare’s treatment of the Bond novels. Although he writes brilliantly about integral components in a chapter titled “The Bond Formula,” he eschews the standard structure of the literary biography whereby the writer’s work unfolds chronologically and each book is examined individually — how it was conceived, shaped, and received. Shakespeare makes no mention of Fleming’s texts being recently amended or slapped with trigger warnings after falling foul of sensitivity readers, but he does flag up instances of outdated stereotypes or egregious viewpoints, not least the assertion by the heroine of The Spy Who Loved Me that “all women love semi-rape.”
Readers who come to this biography for Bond will discover just how much of Fleming’s life and personality went into the books he called “straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety.” But it is just as interesting reading about Fleming’s hectic love life, from an early engagement that ended when his disapproving mother threatened to cancel his allowance, to a string of affairs with single and married women in the 1930s, and to that destructive marriage in which both parties “descend through nagging and jealousy and piranha shoals of recrimination, until the relationship is stripped of its flesh.”
Shakespeare’s hugely compelling biography is a bold reassessment of an intriguing person, not a posh, louche cad but a more rounded, complex, and often humane character. It might not present the complete man, but it is as near to it as we are likely to get.
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Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.