The publication of Casino Royale in 1953 introduced James Bond to the world, and both his popularity and scholarly interest in his creator Ian Fleming show little sign of waning. On the contrary, No Time to Die, the last film in which Daniel Craig appears as 007, received its première in 2021 after a delay caused by the COVID pandemic; Steven Gerrard’s anthology From Blofeld to Moneypenny: Gender in James Bond was published in 2020; and Ian Kinane’s study of Fleming, Jamaica, and post-war politics, Ian Fleming and the Politics of Ambivalence, followed soon thereafter in 2021. Oliver Buckton’s The World Is Not Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming thus hardly constitutes the exhumation of a cultural skeleton from the Cold War; rather, it provides a nuanced reading of Fleming (and Bond) in which fans and scholars alike will take great interest.
My use of the phrase “nuanced reading” is intended to emphasize the acuity of Buckton’s thesis about the text of Ian Fleming’s life and its influence on his writing. To be sure, the most accomplished biographical writing offers more than an inventory of facts, typically by probing its subject’s motives and assessing their larger implications: Why this decision or action? What were the consequences? Such interpretive work, however, is frequently overshadowed by the myriad details that comprise fascinating lives like Fleming’s, but not so with The World Is Not Enough, in which Buckton develops a close or, more consistent with contemporary critical vocabulary, symptomatic reading of Fleming’s early and young adult years. His argument thus expands the reach of previous biographies by outlining in considerable detail the importance of these years in understanding not only Fleming’s subjective life, but also those of his characters, including 007 and so-called “Bond girls” and women.
Buckton’s reading begins with Fleming’s enrollment at Durnford Preparatory School on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, where he was enrolled in 1916 as an eight-year-old, and privileges in particular his years at a private school in Kitzbühel, Austria, where in 1927 Fleming’s mother Eve sent her “errant” nineteen-year-old son to refine his language skills (35). Between these two matriculations, Fleming’s academic record was uneven at best. As he followed his older brother Peter to Eton in 1921 and achieved considerable athletic success there, it also became clear that his “sibling rivalry with Peter was one that he had no hope of winning” (29). Peter, the “golden boy” for whom teachers
formerly reserved their highest praise, was a brilliant student heading for Oxford (33); Ian was not, leaving Eton early and resigning his cadetship after barely a year at the Royal Sandhurst Military Academy. Worried about her son’s prospects, Eve Fleming enrolled him in a private school in Kitzbühel where, under the tutelage of writer Phyllis Bottome and her husband Ernan Forbes Dennis, Ian could prepare to pass the examination required of candidates applying to the Foreign Office. Unfortunately, even after further study at the University of Geneva, his
performance on the exam in 1931 was not impressive enough to win a
position.
At Kitzbühel, as previous biographies have described, Ian benefited
from mentorship influenced by the theories of Austrian psychologist
Alfred Adler. As Peter Gay explains in Freud: A Life for Our
Time (1989), Adler, along with Freud, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Stekel, and
others, was an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society
until 1911 when his theoretical disagreements with Freud devolved into
personal animosity. In Freud’s view, Adler advocated a “world system
without love,” ignoring the “insulted goddess Libido” and discounting
the pleasure principle so central to his theory (Gay 221). More important
for Buckton’s purposes, Adler’s explanation of human subjectivity
emphasizes an individual’s formulation of a “life plan,” and Fleming’s
was both exceedingly ambitious—epitomized by “The World Is Not
Enough,” an aphorism that resurfaces as the Bond family motto in On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963)—and compensatory, a counterbalance to his many “disappointments” (33). Buckton traces the plan’s preliminaries to Durnford, which has been frequently depicted as a Dickensian prison house of gruel, intimidation, and corporal punishment.
For Buckton, however, Durnford also proved “an ideal launch
pad for this overcompensation characterized by a quest for superiority
and striving for dominance and power” (33). Bond’s “fierce ambition
for success” thus reflects Fleming’s own aspirations.
The development of this reading distinguishes The World Is Not
Enough from such studies as Ben Macintyre’s For Your Eyes Only—Ian
Fleming + James Bond (2008). More an excursus of Bond as a cultural
phenomenon than a biography, Macintyre’s book provides an abbreviated review of Fleming’s formative years, unlike, say, Andrew Lycett’s Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond (1995), which lavishes attention on Fleming’s family life, including a précis of Adler’s revolutionary theories. Buckton, though, engages Adlerian concepts—a child’s “order of birth,” sibling rivalry, inferiority complex, and compensation. Of particular interpretive value is the gegenspieler, a familial rival with whom a child contends for parental affection and praise. Equally important, in Kitzbühl, Fleming was much admired by local girls and, while “playing the field or sowing wild oats,” he fell in love with the daughter of a local Swiss landowner to whom he became engaged (47).
But both his mother’s role in quashing the engagement and Peter’s
rising prominence, including his bestselling travel account Brazilian
Adventure (1933), further motivated Ian’s plan to invent a “fictional,
idealized ‘superman’ version of himself” (49). At the risk of digression,
I might add that an Adlerian perspective also proves useful in decoding
the complexities of one of Fleming’s most avid readers, President
John F. Kennedy. In An Unfinished Life (2003), Robert Dallek describes
“Jack’s” rivalry with his older brother Joe, a star-athlete in their schooldays.
Younger brothers like Ian and Jack learn to compete early in life.
In chapters on the 1930s and Fleming’s work as a Lieutenant
Commander in Naval Intelligence in the 40s, Buckton adds texture to
his thesis, also outlining ways in which wartime operations inform the
Bond novels. The 1930s for Fleming were both exciting and disappointing, including the end of any possibility of a diplomatic career and,
conversely, a successful stint as a correspondent for Reuters in Moscow
and Berlin. Dissatisfied with the money a journalist earns, Ian declined
Reuters’ offer to move to Shanghai and instead found employment at
a bank. In 1935, he joined the brokerage firm of Rowe & Pittman, and
soon thereafter the “ties between high finance and secret intelligence
were strengthened” when a former official during World War I was
hired by one of his firm’s competitors (74). As a consequence of his
expanding network of contacts, and because Fleming may have been,
as he was once disparaged, “the world’s worst stockbroker” (qtd. in
Buckton 75), another professional opportunity emerged with the potential to improve his “rather aimless, desultory course in life” (86). In
May of 1939, he was invited to a luncheon interview with the director
of Naval Intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, to serve as his assistant
(86). This meeting facilitated entrance into an entirely new world and
marked both “the turning point of his career and one of the decisive
experiences that led to the creation of James Bond after the war” (88).
The centrality of this meeting in Buckton’s argument also shapes
the book’s narrative, as in the Prologue he presents a fictional version
of the 1939 job interview complete with “speculative dialogue” (xi). The
Prologue is, in effect, a one-act play with skillfully drawn descriptions
of the faded “glamor” of the Carlton Hotel Grill where the scene takes
place, of the Admiral’s “carefully pressed” uniform, and of Fleming’s
unorthodox preferences in martinis—Russian vodka and not gin, a
slice of lemon peel, and, of course, instructions that the concoction be
shaken not stirred. (Like the rest of the book, this playlet originates in
careful research, much of which was conducted in the Fleming Archive
at Indiana University’s Lilly Library.) At the same time, the Prologue
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anticipates Buckton’s later assertions about Fleming and Bond, particularly
its last line when, returning from his meeting, Fleming tells his
then girlfriend Muriel Wright that he got the job. After suggesting that
Eve Fleming will be “so proud of him” when she hears the news, Ian
responds that he was thinking more about his father killed in action in
World War One: “Now I can make peace with him. You see, this is the
first time I’ve ever felt worthy to be called his son” (9).
Consistent with this feeling of inferiority, the chapters that follow
emphasize Fleming’s role during the war and the creation of Bond as
instances of compensation. Both Ian and his brother Peter’s distinguished
service in military intelligence indicates their “shared desire
to live up to the example of their father, Valentine” (82), in many ways
an impossible goal. Moreover, because Ian’s work “excluded him from
the heat of the action,” a fact that greatly “disappointed” him, he made
certain that his “fictional alter ego” was constantly in the thick of it
(101). In this and other ways, Bond counters Ian’s “removal from the
battlefield” and “protection” from the dangers of war (110). And, more
generally, as was evident in Fleming’s nostalgic return to Kitzbühel in
1961, his “fiction was a way to compensate for the shortcomings, disappointments,
and failures” of life (51). This is especially true of On Her
Majesty’s Secret Service, which is partially set in the Swiss Alps, the
site of the “broken engagement” that darkened and complicated his
interior life (41).
The post-war years provided several new opportunities and motives
for Fleming to produce the novels and stories that made him
and James Bond household names. He was afforded the time to write,
having negotiated a position with the Kemsley Group and The Sunday
Times that included an annual two-month winter holiday in Jamaica
at Goldeneye, where he had built a home. Each year between 1952 and
1964, the year of his fatal heart attack, he completed a new Bond novel
beginning with Casino Royale. And, although on occasion international
crises after the war furnished sensational events for Fleming
to weave into his plots—the defection of the “Cambridge Spies” to
Russia, for example—other, more personal factors contributed to his
first novel’s creation. One was Peter’s publication of the spy novel The
Sixth Column in 1951, but there were others. In The Life of Ian Fleming
(1966), John Pearson, while recognizing that Fleming had been preparing
for years for life as a novelist, describes the process of his writing
as “therapy” to ward off a “mid-life crisis” prompted by such factors as
an unhappy marriage, impecuniosity, and impending fatherhood. As
Pearson speculates, writing novels afforded Fleming an escape into
an exciting world quite different from the one in which he struggled.
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Buckton, widely read in British spy fiction, expertly maps this
“other world,” one such novelists as Dennis Wheatley and Eric Ambler
helped to create and Fleming revised. Later chapters of The World Is
Not Enough explore this world, supplying careful readings of Casino
Royale, You Only Live Twice (1964), and others. Here Buckton demonstrates
the interpretive yield of reading elements of Fleming’s fiction—
his rendering of the flora and fauna of Jamaica in Dr. No (1958),
or his creation of complex female characters—through his biography.
Buckton’s later chapter on “Fleming’s Women, ‘Bond Girls’” is thus
of special interest, replacing the common assumption that Bond frequently serves as a “mouthpiece for Ian’s own misogyny” (244), with an insistence on returning to Fleming’s “early years and the formative influence of his mother” (251). But there is more to be said about this important chapter than I can relate here. The chapter ends, appropriately enough, with another woman in Bond’s life who clearly is not a “Bond girl”—Tracy di Vincenzo, all too briefly Tracy Bond, who is murdered in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service—and who serves as an avatar of Muriel Wright, a woman Fleming loved who was tragically killed during the bombing of London in 1944.
I hope these remarks suggest that Oliver Buckton’s The World Is Not
Enough: A Biography of Ian Fleming accomplishes much more than its
subtitle promises. This book is, of course, a fine biography and provides
an incisive perspective of Ian Fleming’s life. But Buckton also utilizes
the facts of this intriguing life to read the surfaces of Fleming’s
fiction (and, in some cases, their filmic adaptations) as symptoms of
much more complex psychical realities.
Stephen Watt
Stephen Watt is Provost Professor Emeritus of English at Indiana University Bloomington. His recent books include Bernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018), “Something Dreadful and Grand”: American Literature and the Irish-Jewish Unconscious (2015), and Beckett and Contemporary Irish Writing (2009). His volume The Worlds of John Wick, co-edited with Caitlin G. Watt, is forthcoming in 2022 from Indiana University Press. Email: watt@indiana.edu.
