Goldeneye: Where Bond Was Born: Ian Fleming's Jamaica (22 page)

It is also important to note that Fleming – and Bond – looked down on pretty much
everyone
who was not British and perceived people of all colours in terms of negative stereotypes of race and nationality. In
Moonraker,
Bond comments on ‘the usual German chip on the shoulder’. The Japanese, Bond tells us in
You Only Live Twice,
have ‘an unquenchable thirst for the bizarre, the cruel and the terrible’. In
Diamonds are Forever,
he describes Italians as ‘bums with monogrammed shirts who spend the day eating spaghetti and meatballs and squirting scent over themselves’. Afrikaners, we learn in the same book, are ‘a bastard race, sly, stupid and ill-bred’. In
Dr No,
the Chinese are ‘hysterical’. And so on, across every nationality Bond encounters. No villain in the Bond novels is ever British. Even when
they are British citizens, such as Goldfinger or
Moonraker’
s Sir Hugo Drax, they turn out to be of foreign racial origin. In a letter to Ann in 1956, having complained about Americans, Ian declared that ‘all foreigners are pestilential’.

But with black Jamaicans and even black Americans, Fleming’s viewpoint seems slightly different. In fact, there is more affection towards these individuals in the novels than is offered towards almost any of the other non-British characters.

When, in
Live and Let Die,
Bond and Leiter go uptown to Harlem to check out Mr Big’s home turf Bond feels they are ‘trespassing. They just weren’t wanted’, and he experiences the ‘same uneasiness of when he was operating behind enemy lines in the war’. He and Leiter receive contemptuous or hostile looks and several men spit in the gutter as they pass. Nonetheless, Leiter tells Bond: ‘Fortunately I like the negroes and they know it somehow … I admire the way they’re getting on in the world.’ His affection – albeit patronising – is based on music, the sort of jazz that Fleming was by now in the habit of buying in New York for his stepson Raymond. Leiter even uses this link to talk himself out of a severe beating later on.

In his fourth novel,
Diamonds are Forever,
Fleming tells us that, like Leiter, ‘Bond had a natural affection for coloured people.’ For Fleming, it is a sign of a ‘good sort’. Just as shooting birds or hurting animals is a sure sign of villainy, if a character in a Bond novel is cruel to a black person, they can expect a prompt comeuppance. In
Diamonds are Forever,
the corrupt jockey Tingaling, ‘cocky’ and with a ‘sharp weasely face’, arrives at the Saratoga mud baths and addresses the black man working there with ‘Hey, you black bastard!’ before trying unsuccessfully to trip him up as he passes with a pail of mud. Tingaling gets his just rewards in the form of boiling mud on his head when hooded hitmen arrive who work for the diamond-smuggling Spang gangsters. One of the hoods, for no apparent reason, ‘lashed his revolver into the centre of the negro’s huge belly’. This then
provides Bond with his motivation. ‘I’ve suddenly taken against the brothers Spang,’ he later tells Leiter. ‘I didn’t like those two men in hoods. The way the man hit that fat negro.’

Despite feeling unwanted and out of place, Bond loves Harlem in
Live and Let Die.
He is ‘spellbound’ by the Savoy Ballroom: ‘He found many of the girls very beautiful. The music hammered its way into his pulse until he almost forgot what he was there for.’ Early on, he eavesdrops on a conversation between two young blacks, and tells Leiter that it ‘Seems they’re interested in much the same things as everyone else – sex, having fun … Thank God they’re not genteel about it.’ As with Coward’s Samolans, and Fleming’s Jamaicans asking directly ‘Will you do me a rudeness?’, Bond admires these characters’ lack of hypocrisy. As the night progresses, the music gets even louder, a stripper appears to the backing of voodoo drums and the air fills with the ‘sour sweet smell’ of marijuana. Bond loves the spontaneity, the physicality and what he would see as the sexy exoticism of it all. His affection is genuine, then, but based on what we would now see as racist clichés.

Similarly, there are good intentions in the well-known passage near the beginning of
Live and Let Die
when Bond and M discuss the ‘progress of the negro race’.

Bond, told by M that Mr Big is ‘probably the most powerful negro criminal in the world’, replies, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a great negro criminal before … plenty of negroes mixed up in diamonds and gold in Africa, but always in a small way. They don’t seem to take to big business. Pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought except when they’ve drunk too much.’

M, who can do no wrong in Fleming’s eyes, and is always described in terms of ‘remarkable’ and ‘shrewd’, continues: ‘The negro races are just beginning to throw up geniuses in all the professions – scientists, doctors, writers. It’s about time they turned out a great criminal. After all there are 250,000,000 in the world. Nearly a third of the white population. They’ve plenty of brains and ability and guts. And now
Moscow’s taught one of them the technique.’ Mr Big himself says almost exactly the same thing to Bond near the end of the novel: ‘In the history of negro emancipation there have already appeared great athletes, great musicians, great writers, great doctors and scientists. In due course, as in the developing history of other races, there will appear negroes great and famous in every other walk of life … It is unfortunate for you that you have encountered the first of the great negro criminals.’

Live and Let Die
was reviewed by the Jamaica
Gleaner
when it came out in hardback the following year. The paper’s regular reviewer found it ‘a taut, exciting, intelligent and extremely sophisticated whodunnit’. But two years later, a paperback was picked up by George Panton, a black writer for the paper. Noting that Fleming’s house on the north coast ‘ranked high among the fabulous dwellings there’, but that he himself did not ‘in the normal course of events meet the glitter set from our Golden Coast’, he went on to express his dismay and disgust at the book, and in particular the exchange quoted above. ‘Surely one is not being over-sensitive at the implied condescension,’ he asked, before describing M’s comments as ‘provocative’. Not that these attitudes surprised him: ‘There is a special West Indian touch that many of us will find all too familiar,’ he wrote. So, for this reader, Fleming’s attempt at ‘affection’ misfires.

Writing about his time in Jamaica right at the end of his life, Fleming’s proudest boast was that he had ‘learned about living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people – two very different lessons I would never have absorbed if my life had continued in its pre-Jamaican metropolitan rut’. The
Gleaner
journalist, and friend of Fleming, Morris Cargill, writing in the same book,
Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica,
set out the manifesto of the work as aiming to ‘tell about the things he saw and experienced, and to tell them from the Jamaican point of view – a point of view he had been increasingly adopting as year by year Jamaica worked her magic on him’.

But what did the ‘Jamaican point of view’ and ‘living amongst, and appreciating, coloured people’ actually mean to Fleming? Cargill, who disliked Ann, criticised her for not wanting to see anyone in Jamaica except friends from England, ‘whereas Ian was a gregarious person and liked to meet all the local tradespeople and that sort of thing’. There’s no doubt that Ian did genuinely like Jamaicans, whom he saw as ‘full of goodwill and cheerfulness and humour’. According to Violet’s great-niece Olivia, Fleming was ‘integrated’ into Oracabessa life by Violet, who in his absence allowed people onto the property and the local revivalist church to use the beach for baptisms. But, like almost all white expatriates, most white Jamaicans and certainly all tourists, Fleming did not have any real, equal-status black Jamaican friends. All his relationships were, in the end, with ‘tradespeople and that sort ofthing’. Chris Blackwell explains that this was not about racism, but class: ‘It was like the South of France, which the British pretty much invented. They would all go there and wouldn’t mix with the French. It was the same thing in Jamaica. It’s not a racial thing, it’s just you don’t have anything to say to anybody.’

At the time of writing
Live and Let Die,
Fleming’s ideal black person – and the one for whom Bond has the greatest ‘natural affection’, even ‘love’ – was Quarrel.

When Bond arrives in Jamaica from Florida, he is brought up to date by the station head Strangways about Mr Big’s Isle of Surprise,
and filled in on the arrangements made for him. Strangways has organised a house opposite the island called Beau Desert (situated, it seems, very close to Coward’s Blue Harbour); there’s also a car, and ‘a good man to act as your factotum. A Cayman Islander called Quarrel. Best swimmer and fisherman in the Caribbean. Terribly keen. Nice chap.’

When Bond and Quarrel meet the next morning, ‘Bond liked him immediately.’ Usually being mixed race is a sure sign of devilry for Fleming, but for Quarrel he makes an exception, as ‘There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him.’ Quarrel reappears in Fleming’s second Jamaica novel,
Dr No,
in which we are told that he is descended from a ‘pirate of Morgan’s time’. This is of course highly commendable in the Fleming universe, and also means that only his ‘spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands were negroid’, he is ‘brown-skinned’ and, like Aubyn Cousins, has ‘warm grey eyes’. (Writing about the Cayman Islands in 1957 in the
Sunday Times,
Fleming notes approvingly that Caymanians ‘have somehow managed to keep their bloodstream free of negroid strains’.)

Quarrel ticks all the Fleming boxes. As well as having pirate and old English blood, he comes from ‘the most famous race of seamen in the world’ and, it is soon made clear, is knowledgeable and sympathetic to nature, as well as an aficionado of the reef. He calls Bond ‘Captain’, just as Fleming loved being called ‘the Commander’. He also has, to Fleming and Bond, the endearing and disarming characteristics they associated with ‘coloured people’: ‘innocence’; ‘simple lusts and desires’; ‘reverence for superstition and instincts, and childish faults’.

When Quarrel first meets Bond, ‘there was no desire to please, or humility in his voice. He was speaking as mate of the ship and his manner was straightforward and candid. That moment defined their relationship. It remained that of a Scots laird with his head stalker; authority was unspoken and there was no room for servility.’

So here we have Fleming’s ideal colonial relationship. There is no challenge to Bond’s superiority – rank, as on a ship, is taken as read; Quarrel is unmistakably ‘staff’. But with mutual respect established and power relations solidified by history and custom, there is no need for coercion. Quarrel will ‘follow Bond unquestioningly’. He therefore almost embodies the frustrations of Norman Manley – ‘We are still a colonial people.’ He is also the closest Bond is going to get to a real black friend.

Part of Quarrel’s job as ‘factotum’, or servant to Bond, is to get him in shape for his underwater adventures to come. For almost all the novel’s duration, Bond is in jeopardy, his whereabouts known to his enemies. This is, of course, a big part of the excitement of the book. But two-thirds of the way through, Fleming gives Bond and the reader a wonderful moment of stillness when he and Quarrel retreat to Negril on the far western coast of Jamaica.

Here Fleming relishes taking his readers to the idyllic, touristic Jamaica, where ‘nothing has happened since Columbus’. It is, for Bond, ‘the most beautiful beach he had ever seen, five miles of white sand sloping easily into the breakers and, behind, the palm trees marching in graceful disarray to the horizon’. Jamaican fishermen with ‘grey canoes pulled up beside pink mounds of discarded conch shells’ have taken the place of the ‘Arawak Indians’, but otherwise ‘there is the impression that time has stood still’.

Here Bond runs, swims and sails and is taught the ways of the reef by Quarrel (although his knowledge of the dangerous West Indian fish in the tanks in Florida, and the attack habits of sharks and barracuda, indicates that he already has substantial underwater expertise). In the evenings they enjoy the ‘quick melancholy’ of the tropical twilight, then hear the ‘zing and tinkle’ of the crickets and tree frogs. Bond’s Man Friday, Quarrel, gives him a massage, then cooks for him ‘succulent meals of fish and eggs and vegetables’.