In the second chapter of John
Gardner’s first novel, The Liquidator (1964), which was Brian Ian ‘Boysie’
Oakes first adventure there is an interesting passage that quotes some of the
influences Boysie’s boss, Colonel Mostyn, subjects him to. As those who have
read the novel will be aware, ‘Boysie’ Oakes is mistaken for being a ruthless
killer when he saves Colonel Mostyn’s life by slaying two Germans who were
going to kill him during the Second World War in Paris in August 1944. Mostyn
was of course wrong to judge that ‘Boysie’ was a ruthless killer who might come
in useful in the future, as he had acted out of nervousness and fear when he
had shot the two Germans. Years later Mostyn, the Second in Command of British
Special Security decides to recruit ‘Boysie’ Oakes to work as an assassin for
the organisation to liquidate potential security risks. Mostyn, we are told,
‘brought his protégé to London for a long, arduous period of grooming and
polishing’:
‘Mostyn personally supervised
Boysie’s reading – which ranged from Cervantes and Luther to Murdoch, Amis and
Ian Fleming. For weeks, Boysie was marched round the National Gallery, the
Natural History Museum, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert and the Wallace Collection.’
(The Liquidator, John Gardner, Corgi Books, London, 1965, pp. 36-7)
Gardner here rather interestingly
quotes the names of James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, and the Angry Young Man,
author of Lucky Jim (1954), and future first Bond continuation author, Kingsley
Amis. He places both authors in the rather esteemed company of Cervantes,
Luther and Murdoch. It is rather ironic that John Gardner himself would become
both authors’ immediate successor when he took over the mantle of continuation
Bond author and publish Licence Renewed in 1981. It is also rather ironic that
Kingsley Amis would attack Gardner’s Bond novels both privately in letters to
his friend, the poet Philip Larkin and publicly in a harsh review of For Special Services, entitled ‘Double Low Tar 7, Licence to Underkill’ for the Times
Literary Supplement on 17 September 1982. Amis in many ways must have saw
himself as the only true heir to Ian Fleming when he published the first
continuation Bond novel, Colonel Sun, under the pen name ‘Robert Markham’ in
1968. He therefore clearly felt he was qualified, as one who had been that way
before, to attack what he saw as sub-standard work that brought, in his
opinion, the works of Ian Fleming into disrepute. In his Times Literary
Supplement review, Amis had railed against Gardner quite personally from the
start:
‘Quite likely it ill becomes a
man placed as I am to say that whereas its predecessor was bad enough by any
reasonable standard, the present offering is an unrelieved disaster all the way
from its aptly forgettable title to the photograph of the author – surely an
unflattering likeness – on the back of the jacket. If so that is just my bad
luck. On the other hand, perhaps I can claim the privilege of at least a
momentary venting of indignation at the disrepute into which this publication
brings the name and works of Ian Fleming. Let me get something like that said
before I have to start being funny and clever and risk letting the thing escape
through underkill.’
Later on in the same review, Amis
concludes,
‘What makes Mr Gardner’s book so
hard to read is not so much its endlessly silly story as its desolateness, its
lack of the slightest human interest or warmth. Ian Fleming himself would have
conceded that he was not the greatest delineator of character: even so his
people have genuine life and substance and many of them both experience and
inspire feeling. So far from being the ‘man who is only a silhouette’ Bond is
shown to be fully capable of indignation, compunction, remorse, tenderness and
a protective instinct towards defenceless creatures.
[…]
By a kind of tradition, however,
perhaps started by Buchan with Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages,
the main character-interest in this type of novel attaches to the villain. Mr
Big, Hugo Drax, Dr No and their like are persons of some size and power. They
are made to seem to exist in their own right, to have been operating since long
before Bond crossed their paths, rather than to have been run up on the spot
for him to practise on. But then to do anything like that the writer must be
genuinely interested in his material.’
John Gardner wrote about meeting
Kingsley Amis at the Savoy Hotel in London in June 1984 in the section ‘The Bond Books’ on his website - http://www.john-gardner.com - in early 2002:
‘I was amazed to read recently, in Kingsley Amis’s letters, that Kingsley was convinced I was absolutely no
good at producing a thriller of drama and tension. In fact he had commented to
Philip Larkin that Peter Janson-Smith had thrown the manuscript of Licence
Renewed back at me because it was so bad. This, of course, never happened
except in the sense that I would take every manuscript back to do the necessary
work to make a better book and comply with those changes I had accepted from
the editor.
Amis was in fact quite amusing. I
met him at a lunch party Len Deighton gave at the Savoy for Eric Ambler’s
birthday. Out of devilment I said to him, “Kingsley, you’re quite right: the
Bond books are terrible hokum. No good at all. Dreadful,” – he had reviewed
Licence Renewed for, I think, The Times Literary Supplement, and it was a
review in which he set about me with a cat o’ nine tails, the rack and the
Chinese Water Torture. Kingsley looked at me in bewilderment, spluttering, “Oh
no, my dear chap, no! No!”
Gardner is actually slightly
mistaken in his recollections here. He has become confused about who exactly wrote which particular review.
It was Philip Larkin, and not Kingsley Amis, who reviewed his first Bond novel,
Licence Renewed under the title ‘The Batman from Blades’ for the Times
Literary Supplement in May 1981. As is already stated, Amis actually reviewed
For Special Services for the Times Literary Supplement in 1982. It is indeed
interesting that Gardner and Amis met each other, and how their public and
private thoughts about each other were so different. Of course when Amis was
faced with Gardner, who was clearly trying to pull his leg, it would have been
very unlikely that he would have said something rude like, “Oh no, no, my dear
chap. Fleming’s Bond was anything but hokum. However, your incarnation brings
his novels and indeed reputation into disrepute. You should be ashamed of
yourself!” I suppose Gardner is trying to say that although Amis heavily
attacked his Bond continuation novels in private letters and in print, he did
not have the courage of his convictions to be downright rude and say face to
face to him that his work was complete rubbish. It seems Gardner takes some
comfort from this, that perhaps Amis’s bark was worse than his bite. Now Amis
was a curmudgeonly character by all accounts, but he clearly would not stoop so
low as to attack an author to his face at a friend’s birthday party, despite
his already much vaunted opinions in print. This was of course just good
manners, and it wouldn’t really have been expected for Amis to have reiterated
what he had written in his review of For Special Services, or to have laid bare
his thoughts from his private letters to Philip Larkin. His hardened opinions
about Gardner’s Bond novels probably never left him, but we have no record of
what he thought of the others in the series, if he ever deigned to read any of
them.
Another point of interest is the
fact that all of these authors were either friends or had at least become
acquainted with each other. John Gardner for instance met Kinsley Amis, his
predecessor as Bond continuation author at a lunch party fellow spy novelist
and friend Len Deighton gave at the Savoy for another spy novelist, Eric
Ambler. Ambler, it will be remembered was greatly admired by Fleming and Bond
is actually reading Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) on the Orient Express
with ‘Captain Nash’ in Fleming’s From Russia, With Love (1957). The public and
private interactions about James Bond that occurred between these authors and poets is fascinating
and it would certainly have been very informative to have been a fly on the
wall at that lunch party at the Savoy which featured Gardner, Amis, Deighton,
Ambler and undoubtedly other authors of note.
TBB Article No. 7
© The Bondologist Blog, 2007.
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