THE SPY WHO LOVED THE LONDON LIBRARY BY PETER ETTEDGUI

Any links between the Library and the world’s most famous secret agent have hitherto being subject to the Official Secrets Act. Now, on the 60th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, and the publication of Solo, William Boyd’s chronicle of 007’s adventures, all can be revealed, as Peter Ettedgui explains.

On a melancholic afternoon towards the end of 1962, St James’s Square carpeted with snow, it appears that a copy of Burke’s General Armory (1962 edn) – a standard work for scholars of heraldry – was borrowed from The London Library. Franked 10 December, the hefty tome was duly slipped into the luggage of secret agent (and, we may infer, Library member) James Bond as he packed for his new mission in Switzerland. Burke is not perhaps the kind of reading matter one immediately associates with 007, but it was essential to the business at hand, for Bond was about to assume the guise of a genealogist investigating a dubious claim to the medieval French title, ‘Comte de Bleuville’ . On arrival at the pretender’s alpine retreat, Bond would unmask him as none other than his great nemesis, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, and foil an insidious plot to unleash biological warfare on the UK.

Which is all very well, but what – members might reasonably enquire – of the Library’s copy of Burke’s General Armory? Perusing the catalogue half a century later, I’m afraid I must report that there is no record of it ever having been returned. Judging from the official chronicle of the mission (which, unlike Burke, is still available to members, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming, 1963, Fiction), it seems that Bond, his cover blown, was unable to retrieve the volume from his guest quarters in Blofeld’s mountain-top complex before making good his escape on skis. In mitigation: the book surely would have weighed him down, perhaps fatally, on that perilous descent, under heavy gunfire from the thugs in hot pursuit. We can only assume that the General Armory was, like much of the ordnance with which Bond is equipped by his Quartermaster, a casualty of the mission. Quite possibly, it was incinerated when 007 later returned to Switzerland with a fleet of helicopters to blow up Blofeld’s alpine retreat.

Bond’s apparent failure to return Burke notwithstanding, this episode implies that the Library has played a more significant role in his extraordinary career than previously suspected. Whereas more than one critic has suggested that Bond, entirely lacking an inner life, would have no use for books, I beg to differ. The routine nature of his acquisition of Burke suggests this was nothing out of the ordinary. Moreover, every self-respecting 007 scholar knows that Bond has whiled away many an afternoon (and a considerable proportion of his civil servant’s wages) in the environs of St James’s Square: lunching at Scott’s before visiting his tailor on Savile Row and running the gauntlet of his favourite Jermyn Street emporia (Lock & Co. Hatters, John Lobb Bootmaker, Turnbull & Asser and Floris). Is it really a stretch to imagine him paying a visit to the Library between a shopping spree and the first Martini of the evening at the discreet bar of Dukes Hotel (where, incidentally, one can still order Bond’s classic ‘Vesper’ recipe, shaken over ice – not stirred)?

With this in mind, let’s imagine Bond stalking the stacks, from the subterranean bowels of Topography to the lofty heights of Religion, picking out the books (referenced by Fleming) that he may well have borrowed from the Library’s collection, either for professional research or personal recreation. In Topography, West Indies, we find Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree (1950). ‘This extraordinary book had been recommended to Bond by M. “It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about, ” he said. “This isn’t medieval black-magic stuff. It’s being practised every day” ’ (Live and Let Die © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1954).

Heeding M’s tip, Bond began to read Leigh-Fermor’s masterpiece of travel literature in a New York hotel room, while preparing for a new mission that would take him to the Caribbean, setting of Th e Traveller’s Tree and that most iconic of Bond locations. Riveted and appalled by the tales of voodoo sacrifice recounted by Leigh-Fermor, Bond ‘was glad to put the dreadful tale aside and re-enter the world of normality. But it took him minutes to forget the atmosphere, heavy with terror and occult, that had surrounded him as he read. ’

However, it might be said that the sinister atmosphere evoked by Leigh-Fermor would never entirely disappear from Bond’s world; not only does it hang heavy over the mission at hand (Live and Let Die, 1954, Fiction), but it presages an entire rogue’s gallery of Bond villains with their almost supernatural ability to bend the world to their dark and twisted stratagems. Such is the influence of The Traveller’s Tree on Bond, indeed, that a copy recently sold for £1,700 at an auction of 007-related first editions.

Leigh-Fermor was great friends with Fleming, whose own travel writing, collected in a superb anthology, Thrilling Cities (1963), is located at Topography, Europe (& Gen.). We can’t be sure if Bond himself ever borrowed or read this book, but when I recently embarked on my own ‘mission’ to develop story background for the next two Bond films, Thrilling Cities was one of the first books I pulled down from the Library’s shelves, and it directly inspired how I researched and plotted potential travel itineraries for 007. In this jaded era of no-frills, low-cost aviation, Fleming’s evocation of the excitement and glamour of the early days of air travel may seem quaintly nostalgic, but it remains today a key ingredient of Bond mythology.

Fleming’s modus operandi as a travel writer is to eschew any pretence at traditional tourism; as he instructs his guide in Tokyo, ‘No museums, temples, Imperial palaces or Noh plays, let alone tea ceremonies’ . In their place, he seeks out more visceral and sybaritic pleasures: a Sumo wrestling match, an afternoon shopping in the Ginza, a consultation with a soothsayer, ‘the most luxurious Japanese bath’ , consumption of ‘large quantities of raw fish for which I have a weakness’ , ditto sake (in order to find out ‘whether it was truly alcoholic or not’). Oh, and ‘an evening with geishas’ (Thrilling Cities © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1963).

Although Bond stuck pretty closely to Fleming’s itinerary when he visited Japan, he also unexpectedly engaged with Japanese literary culture, developing a keen interest in the 17-syllable haikus of Matsuo Bashõ, a seventeenth-century poet who, according to the chief of the Japanese secret service, is the equal of Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes or Goethe. Having familiarised himself with the structure of haiku (which he possibly dug up in Bashõ’s works in Literature, Japanese), Bond even had a ‘bash’ (sic) at his own composition, which gave Fleming the title for 007’s Japanese mission (1964, Fiction): ‘You only live twice:/ Once when you are born/ And once when you look death in the face’ (You Only Live Twice © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1964).

Bond’s credible effort may run two syllables over-length, but its intimation of mortality surely belies the image of an action hero with no inner life, and hints at a more contemplative aspect to his character. Tatiana Romanova, a beautiful Soviet agent sent to seduce him in From Russia with Love (1957, Fiction), intuits this before she even meets him. As M records to Bond, ‘ “You reminded her of the hero of a book by some Russian fellow called Lermontov. This hero chap liked gambling and spent his whole time getting in and out of scraps ” ’ (From Russia with Love © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1957).

Bond may well have looked up the book in question in the Library (A Hero of Our Time, first English edn 1853, Fiction). If so, he would indeed have found a near mirrorimage of himself in the story’s protagonist. Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin’s seductions of the ravishing habituées of a spa resort in the Caucasus are interwoven with his daring exploits as an army officer in the Georgian mountains.

But for all the glamour of this life, Pechorin is plagued by ennui, that almost existential sense of life’s futility that afflicted Russian anti-heroes from Pushkin’s Onegin to Chekhov’s Vanya. Bond undoubtedly suffered from this ailment himself, even if he chose to identify it by the Latin equivalent, accidie. During longueurs between missions, waiting for a new call to adventure from M, he would be afflicted by this wretched, debilitating torpor, which ironically seemed to cause him more genuine anguish than any number of ingenious and sadistic deaths planned for him by his various antagonists in the field. Schooled in the Classics at Eton and Fettes College, Bond deftly adapted a Euripidean proverb to describe his malaise: ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make bored. ’

A visit to the stacks of Science & Miscellaneous may have helped Bond dispel his accidie. These shelves contain a cornucopia of subjects to aid and abet the secret agent preparing for a high-stakes mission – inter alia, Atomic Theory &c., Cards, Fear, Gold &c., Human Sacrifice, Pain, Poisons, Sex, Smuggling, Wine, and Women. From the section devoted to Military Science, he may well have leafed through a copy of On War (1832), referred to in Moonraker (1955, Fiction): ‘Bond had achieved Clausewitz’s first principle. He had made his base secure ’ (Moonraker © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1955). A few shelves away, Spies &c. is home to The Craft of Intelligence by Allen Welsh Dulles (1963). Bond perused this survey of the world’s second oldest profession while recovering from abduction and brainwashing by the KGB (events recorded in The Man with the Golden Gun, 1965, Fiction). Written by the CIA’s longest-serving director, this guide to the history and tradecraft of espionage presumably helped to ‘unbrainwash’ Bond (M’s coinage). One can speculate that he must have been surprised and flattered by the book’s description of him as ‘the unique James Bond’ . Dulles, it transpires, was a huge admirer of Bond and would parse his adventures for any useful information on gadgetry. The homing device issued to Bond to keep track of Auric Goldfinger, for example, inspired an entire CIA project. Alas, this came to nought, as Dulles later recounted, because his team of boffins could not work out how to keep track of a surveillance subject after they entered a crowded urban zone (a problem that the NSA and GCHQ recently appear to have solved).

Before we leave Science & Miscellaneous, one last book is worthy of the Bond scholar’s attention. Among the ornithological works collected under the shelfmark Birds is a slim, elegantly illustrated volume entitled Field Guide to Birds of the West Indies (1947). Fleming, an avid birdwatcher, counted this as one of his bibles at his Jamaican home. When seeking a name for the protagonist of his first novel, he simply stole that of the guide’s author: James Bond: ‘It struck me that this brief, unromantic, Anglo-Saxon and yet very masculine name was just what I needed – and so a second James Bond was born’ (reproduced with permission from the Ian Fleming Estate).

The notion of the second James Bond exploring the top-floor stacks of Religion may seem somewhat incongruous, but Fleming records that 007 once packed a copy of Ernest Sutherland Bates’s The Bible Designed to be Read as Literature (1937, Religion, Bibles), in his luggage on a mission to Miami (Goldfinger, 1959, Fiction). In this instance, one can only hope that Bond did not borrow the book from the Library, for it was later revealed that its pages had been hollowed out in order to secrete his Walther PPK handgun (presumably by an overzealous atheist in Q Branch).

More typically, the books Bond chose to read for recreation on his travels are located in the shelves of Fiction. We learn, from close reading of Fleming’s chronicles, that he is keen on Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler and the macabre stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Special mention is given to Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), although Bond never quite gets round to finishing the thriller during a long train journey on board the Orient Express in From Russia with Love : ‘His concentration was going. He was too tired. He laid the book down on his lap and closed his eyes … ’ (From Russia with Love © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1957). For this lapse, one must surely blame the nervepoison slipped into Bond’s Chianti, now working its way through his body, rather than any page-turning deficiencies in the novel (after all, Ambler’s writing was ‘the source on which we all draw’ , according to John le Carré). Perhaps in return for this piece of literary product placement, Fleming asked Ambler in 1959 to introduce James Bond to Alfred Hitchcock. Ambler duly obliged, but the Master of Suspense declined the opportunity to direct a first 007 film, and Bond’s cinematic debut would have to wait until 1962.

More than 50 years later, the twentyfourth Bond film in the most successful franchise in cinema history is now in development. The world may have changed beyond all recognition in that half-century, but the adage coined by Cubby Broccoli to keep Bond alive and kicking has remained as relevant as ever: ‘Always go back to Ian Fleming. ’ The James Bond books, penned by Fleming and located on the Library’s Fiction shelves, remain the touchstone not only for Bond’s cinematic exploits, but also for his continuing literary adventures. Fellow Library member William Boyd is the latest author assigned to chronicle 007’s adventures. Boyd began his mission by reading each and every Bond book and constructing a timeline to which he rigorously adheres in Solo, which is published this month, 60 years after the appearance of Casino Royale (1953, Fiction), Fleming’s first book. Boyd is also of the opinion that James Bond is much more of a literary creature than previously acknowledged. ‘Fleming refers to Bond’s book-lined sitting-room, ’ he muses when we meet to discuss the secret agent’s reading habits. ‘Bond even recalls some lines of poetry in one of the novels; that surely indicates he is a cultured man, if not quite an intellectual. ’ Boyd is referring to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem Brahma (1857, in Emerson’s Complete Works, 1866, Eng. Lit.), which is indeed quoted from in Diamonds are Forever (1956, Fiction): ‘Suddenly, there flashed unwanted into Bond’s mind that most sinister line in all poetry: “They reckon ill who leave me out. When me they fly, I am the wings ”’ (Diamonds are Forever © Ian Fleming Publications Ltd 1956).

James Bond, 007. Secret agent with a licence to kill – and a London Library membership card. Although sworn to secrecy about the mission recorded in Solo, Boyd does reveal that Bond will be travelling with a copy of Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter (1948, Fiction) in his luggage. He also tells me that Bond’s choice of reading matter offers a clue to his destination in Solo.

We can only wish 007 bon voyage and pray that The Heart of the Matter makes it back from West Africa to the Library’s stacks in one piece.