Ian Fleming Nervously Attends a Matinee
After recognizing On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as a splendid variation on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we’re left to admire not only the ingenuity of Fleming’s adaptation, but the inspired follow-up suggested by a tearful ending. Bond loses his wife on their wedding day and then numbly explains to an investigating patrolman that she’s only having a rest.
According to Oliver Buchan in The World Is Not Enough, Fleming was channeling his beloved Muriel Wright who died in her sleep, killed by falling masonry during the Blitz. Perhaps so, but he’s also teeing up a sequel based on the afternoon catnap that allows Sir Orfeo’s bride to be whisked away by the Fairy King in another Middle-English classic, setting her husband off on a long and relentless pursuit.
Sure enough, You Only Live Twice finds Bond on the far side of the world, descending into the realm of the dead.
Like the best of the Bonds, this one is taut, exciting, outrageous, and yet in some sense very nearly believable, even towards the end when Bond seems to shift from Sir Orfeo to the role of Hercules in the Underworld, stripped down to a loincloth to battle his foes with a club. At no point does he perform a feat half as implausible as the average stunt from a Hollywood action film of the 80’s and 90’s (perhaps excluding the arm-wrestling inOver the Top).
When, like Orfeo, Bond does get his wife back from the Otherworld, we allow ourselves to buy into the idea because we understand that she's not the same girl. Having lost his memory, the hero doesn’t notice any substitution. This must be the girl he married. She says she is. In fact, by making Kissy another Garbo lookalike, Fleming not only allows Bond to get on with his interrupted honeymoon, but also that extended romantic getaway with Tatiana that was planned as the ending of From Russia With Love. A romantic getaway, plus some fishing - what more could a man could want?
Of course there’s an obstacle to the romance, because Bond has forgotten more than just his name. Reviving her bedmate’s libido with a pornographic how-to manual purchased in a nearby city, Kissy manages to keep Bond imprisoned as her complacent sex-slave long enough to get what she really wants out of him.
Upon first reading the book as a pre-teen I may have had only a hazy idea of what Bond and Kissy were doing in that fisherman’s hut, but I thought I understood exactly where Fleming found the inspiration for Bond's captivity, and it had nothing to do with Middle-English poetry.
In Hercules Unchained, a disappointing sequel to the box office phenomenon of 1958, Hercules, bodybuilder-turned-actor Steve Reeves makes an unexpected detour on his journey to Thebes. Absent-mindedly taking a sip from the Waters of Forgetfulness he becomes the consort of the Queen of Lydia, who keeps men as playthings before having them assassinated and mummified for display in her trophy room.
I try to imagine Fleming’s discomfort as he watches a juvenile fantasy involving athletic young Italian men capering about in miniskirts, while slouching in his seat, filing notes in his head and hoping that no one spots him. He comes out of the theater with the germ of an idea that might be retrieved in a couple of years for a Bond thriller. Not just any of them of course, but one in which Bond must briefly essay the same role Reeves had just performed.
Fleming would have been well aware that the term “Waters of Forgetfulness” refers to the Greek myth of Lethe, one of the five rivers surrounding the realm of Hades. While it makes little sense to keep the stuff in a public trough to ensnare new boyfriends for the queen, the idea of a hero with amnesia dovetails nicely with Bond’s escape from the Underworld at the end of You Only Live Twice. After being whisked away by a weather balloon while a volcanic geyser explodes beneath him, Bond plummets into the drink, suffering temporary amnesia from a concussion, not from swilling enchanted water. Symbolically, however, being fished out of the sea at the edge of the Underworld with a clean slate must have struck the author as an irresistible idea. With any sense of guilt scrubbed away along with his memory, Mr. Bond is about to start over fresh.
The last book Fleming saw to publication serves as a perfect sendoff for David Niven, long one of Fleming’s favorite choices for the role of James Bond, but recently removed from consideration. As a consolation prize, Kissy Suzuki reminisces about the actor's kindness during her brief but mostly unhappy tenure in Hollywood.
At the same time, YOLT is a welcoming bouquet to the actor who took Niven’s role, another of those former bodybuilders who, Fleming must have thought, might look absolutely fabulous in a loincloth, swinging a wooden stave and generally raising hell in the Underworld.