On receiving for this year’s birthday James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, I decided to read an Ian Fleming Bond novel for the first time in sixty years. It turned out that my 1962 copy of Dr No is the only Bond left on my shelves, although at the time I read at least four of the others and certainly owned more than Dr No. It’s quite possible that I hung on to the latter because the film of Dr No came out in the same year, I saw it, and as a fourteen-year-old boy was particularly impressed by the paperback’s cover:
As you may recall, avians (not to say birds) play an important part in Dr No. There are the cormorants who excrete the guano that Julius No mines, there is the colony of Roseate Spoonbills on Crab Key Island that the Audubon Society is passionate about conserving, and other species flit through the novel. I am delighted to tell you, from consulting Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, that Fleming’s references to them are accurate.
Moreover, I did not find the novel as bad as I was expecting. It is laughable that Evelyn Waugh should criticise the ‘sadism’ of the Bond books when his own satire is horribly sadistic and his Catholicism so morbid. There is humour, a delight in beauty, a great sensuousness and quickness in Fleming’s writing that Waugh was wise never to attempt. I enjoyed all that in my re-reading of Dr No, but my interest flagged halfway through when the fantasy and fake psychology took over. The problem is genre. The early chapters set in London and Kingston are pacy, they show more than tell, and the details are beautifully observed; so these chapters read like a very good realistic novel, at least as good as Graham Greene. Superhuman endurance, a fire-breathing dragon, a man with his heart on the right, a giant squid in an underwater cage, a naked blonde Venus, Julius No’s obliging seven-page account of his life and beliefs, belong in the genre of the spy fantasy novel — a genre I can’t really connect with and one that I’m sure Waugh had no time for.
Dr No was the first Bond film and when it appeared a cult of it, the novels and Sean Connery broke out at my school. No doubt it was the violence, action, suspense and sex that kept us turning the pages, but I feel it was really the chic of it all that grabbed us most: the Sunbeam Talbot, the Royal Blend cigarettes, the caviar double de Beluga, the Floris Lime bath essence and Guerlain bathcubes, the Walther PPK 7.65 mm, the Vesper Martini… It was a kind of consumer fetishism to go with the sexual. Boys started wearing blue Sea Island cotton shirts with black knitted ties and looking coolly tough.
Our English master did not approve of the novels (he was a Leavisite). I must say the phenomenon intrigued me so much that, using several carbons, I bashed out on my typewriter a questionnaire intended to discover whether and why the boys in my year were so taken by Bond. I thought the results would make an interesting article for the school magazine. Extra cachet, it occurred to me, would accrue if I could interview Fleming during one of his visits to Sandwich Bay. He was a member of Royal St George’s Golf Club and a boy in our class even had a relative who was the model for Alfred Blacking in the famous Goldfinger golf match! So I wrote to Fleming. Knowing his popularity and busy intercontinental life, I did not seriously expect a reply. Yet one came:
The letter is a model of writerly patience, politeness and straight talking towards a fifteen-year-old nuisance. I assume it was typed by a secretary, as the layout and accuracy look professional. ‘Opera’ here means ‘works’ and his use of the word is perhaps deliberately uncondescending to a grammar school boy. But what touches me most is that when Fleming came to sign he decided it should end in an exclamation mark, so he put the top part of that in by hand. I also liked his pun on bondage. Above all, his sheer kindness in writing and sending the Harvard parody staggered me. Naturally, I thanked him.
I am jolly glad I kept Ian Fleming’s letter, because I was far more cavalier as a teenager about binning or giving things away than I am now. I abandoned the Bond questionnaire because it was too time consuming. Not one sample has survived. The Harvard parody, by Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith, was in the form of a Signet-style paperback called Alligator. It was amusing, but I lent it to someone and never saw it again. I wrote a sketch on consumerism in Bond for That Was the Week That Was and never even kept a copy. I also wrote a long parody myself called something like Basil Don Bond and the Mystery of Crane Fly Island. It was written on a whole quarto pad of Basildon Bond. My mother came across it in my room, read it, and vehemently declared it ‘a waste of paper’! Needing to get it out of the house, therefore, I passed it to a schoolfriend, who chortled over it. Unfortunately, when he left home for university his mother came across the manuscript, read it, and threw it out with his other debris. This was perhaps connected with the fact that the last two sentences — and the only words I can remember — were:
Bond pulled hard at the oars and the girl sat in the prow of the boat. She was wearing only a newspaper.
Ah, youth!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon c.1901
Captain of the 11
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
My bond with Bond
On receiving for this year’s birthday James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, I decided to read an Ian Fleming Bond novel for the first time in sixty years. It turned out that my 1962 copy of Dr No is the only Bond left on my shelves, although at the time I read at least four of the others and certainly owned more than Dr No. It’s quite possible that I hung on to the latter because the film of Dr No came out in the same year, I saw it, and as a fourteen-year-old boy was particularly impressed by the paperback’s cover:
As you may recall, avians (not to say birds) play an important part in Dr No. There are the cormorants who excrete the guano that Julius No mines, there is the colony of Roseate Spoonbills on Crab Key Island that the Audubon Society is passionate about conserving, and other species flit through the novel. I am delighted to tell you, from consulting Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, that Fleming’s references to them are accurate.
Moreover, I did not find the novel as bad as I was expecting. It is laughable that Evelyn Waugh should criticise the ‘sadism’ of the Bond books when his own satire is horribly sadistic and his Catholicism so morbid. There is humour, a delight in beauty, a great sensuousness and quickness in Fleming’s writing that Waugh was wise never to attempt. I enjoyed all that in my re-reading of Dr No, but my interest flagged halfway through when the fantasy and fake psychology took over. The problem is genre. The early chapters set in London and Kingston are pacy, they show more than tell, and the details are beautifully observed; so these chapters read like a very good realistic novel, at least as good as Graham Greene. Superhuman endurance, a fire-breathing dragon, a man with his heart on the right, a giant squid in an underwater cage, a naked blonde Venus, Julius No’s obliging seven-page account of his life and beliefs, belong in the genre of the spy fantasy novel — a genre I can’t really connect with and one that I’m sure Waugh had no time for.
Dr No was the first Bond film and when it appeared a cult of it, the novels and Sean Connery broke out at my school. No doubt it was the violence, action, suspense and sex that kept us turning the pages, but I feel it was really the chic of it all that grabbed us most: the Sunbeam Talbot, the Royal Blend cigarettes, the caviar double de Beluga, the Floris Lime bath essence and Guerlain bathcubes, the Walther PPK 7.65 mm, the Vesper Martini… It was a kind of consumer fetishism to go with the sexual. Boys started wearing blue Sea Island cotton shirts with black knitted ties and looking coolly tough.
Our English master did not approve of the novels (he was a Leavisite). I must say the phenomenon intrigued me so much that, using several carbons, I bashed out on my typewriter a questionnaire intended to discover whether and why the boys in my year were so taken by Bond. I thought the results would make an interesting article for the school magazine. Extra cachet, it occurred to me, would accrue if I could interview Fleming during one of his visits to Sandwich Bay. He was a member of Royal St George’s Golf Club and a boy in our class even had a relative who was the model for Alfred Blacking in the famous Goldfinger golf match! So I wrote to Fleming. Knowing his popularity and busy intercontinental life, I did not seriously expect a reply. Yet one came:
The letter is a model of writerly patience, politeness and straight talking towards a fifteen-year-old nuisance. I assume it was typed by a secretary, as the layout and accuracy look professional. ‘Opera’ here means ‘works’ and his use of the word is perhaps deliberately uncondescending to a grammar school boy. But what touches me most is that when Fleming came to sign he decided it should end in an exclamation mark, so he put the top part of that in by hand. I also liked his pun on bondage. Above all, his sheer kindness in writing and sending the Harvard parody staggered me. Naturally, I thanked him.
I am jolly glad I kept Ian Fleming’s letter, because I was far more cavalier as a teenager about binning or giving things away than I am now. I abandoned the Bond questionnaire because it was too time consuming. Not one sample has survived. The Harvard parody, by Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith, was in the form of a Signet-style paperback called Alligator. It was amusing, but I lent it to someone and never saw it again. I wrote a sketch on consumerism in Bond for That Was the Week That Was and never even kept a copy. I also wrote a long parody myself called something like Basil Don Bond and the Mystery of Crane Fly Island. It was written on a whole quarto pad of Basildon Bond. My mother came across it in my room, read it, and vehemently declared it ‘a waste of paper’! Needing to get it out of the house, therefore, I passed it to a schoolfriend, who chortled over it. Unfortunately, when he left home for university his mother came across the manuscript, read it, and threw it out with his other debris. This was perhaps connected with the fact that the last two sentences — and the only words I can remember — were:
Ah, youth!
ADVERTISEMENT
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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