Ian Fleming on writing good reports—and fiction

The Amazon/Bond film series news I responded to earlier this week was an interesting coincidence, as I’ve been reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new biography Ian Fleming: The Complete Man for about a month and a half now.

As assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence during World war II, Ian Fleming had to read and write many, many reports. Fortunately for him, he brought some natural talent as well as prior experience as a reporter for Reuters to the job. Here, excerpted from a classified memo in Shakespeare’s book, are three essentials Fleming insisted upon for the reports he received:

A report should aim at three virtues. First, it should have impact; the reader must be made to know at once what it is about; the opening sentence is therefore of great importance. Second, it should be unambiguous; it must leave no room for doubt or ignorance other than the doubt or ignorance which the writer has himself expressed. Third, it should have the brevity which comes only from clear intention; the writer must know what he wishes to say before he begins to say it; otherwise he will hedge and be verbose. He should imagine himself in the position of one who will have to act, and act quickly, on the information which his report contains.

With regard to clear and unambiguous meaning, compare one of CS Lewis’s bits of writing advice from a 1956 letter: “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.” This is not to say ambiguity has no place in fiction, of course, but that must be the author’s purpose—just like an intelligence officer who must leave room only for those doubts he himself wants to convey about his report.

Directness or immediacy, clarity, and concision born of precision and purpose: as Shakespeare notes, “lan wrote his novels in this manner.” Good writing is good writing regardless of form, genre, or content.

Whither 007, again?

“Always makes me feel a little melancholy—grand old warship being ignominiously hauled away for scrap.”

— Q in Skyfall

Last week Amazon announced “a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights” with MGM and Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, who had previously controlled the Bond film series. Lest that opening statement come across as too vague and businessy, the next sentence clarifies that Amazon “will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise.”

This news has been pretty roundly greeted with doomsaying. Amazon, after all, has previously dropped a billion to scrabble up rights to some of Tolkien’s work, resulting in “The Rings of Power.” Projects like this as well as Amazon’s general ethos fueled justifiable distrust on the part of Wilson and Broccoli, who briefly made the news a couple months ago, following a meeting with an Amazon exec who called Bond “content,” for describing Amazon leadership as “f—ing idiots.” But the “impasse” between Broccoli and Wilson and Amazon is at an end, something that cost Amazon a billion dollars. The heirs of Cubby Broccoli’s six-decade film series have been bought out, ousted. Wilson has stated clearly that he’s retiring while Broccoli has gestured toward working on “other projects.”

Some “joint venture.”

I’m pretty sure I’m in the doomsayers’ camp. Though every internet comment section on this story is full of people saying “What about ‘Reacher’?!” it should be indisputable that Amazon has a poor track record with literary adaptations and a well-deserved reputation for milking “IP” dry for “content.” That Deadline article offers the clearest reporting on this story when it describes Amazon spending that billion “to ensure that they could fully steer and exploit” Bond. And that’s not even to get into the woke Hollywood stuff that will inevitably intrude.

Indeed, it already has. Broccoli and Wilson might have guided the film series for decades but Ian Fleming’s estate still controls the books—and I use the word control deliberately. It was the estate’s official statement on the Amazon takeover that finally got me feeling something about all of this. After writing that the estate is “enormously excited about the next phase of the James Bond story on film under Amazon’s creative leadership,” whatever that mythical creature is, the statement praises the Broccoli family, who “have always respected the legacy of Ian Fleming and his words and his original depiction of Agent 007.”

This is pretty rich coming from the estate that has commissioned new books like On His Majesty’s Secret Service and Double or Nothing, which are not only tediously politically pandering but artistically weak, and that—most galling of all—authorized censorship of Fleming’s originals and moved to make sure only the bowdlerized versions are available. Fleming’s words—precisely what the estate praises Broccoli and Wilson for protecting.

Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I.

I have no particular loyalty to Broccoli and Wilson and have written in annoyance about them before, but to dedicate decades to the maintenance of a film project begun by their father is unique in a business governed by algorithm, merchandizing, profit margins, and the vicissitudes of political expediency. We shall not see their like again.

If you’re interested in some gossip about all of this, here’s a piece at the Daily Mail that claims to have scuttlebutt provided by an Amazon insider. For a more sober consideration of what all this means, pro and con, than what you’ll pick up from screechy YouTubers, I recommend this piece at IGN. And for an underrated former Bond’s opinion, let me conclude with a bit of Timothy Dalton’s reaction:

The movies have taken different courses over the years, but there is something very good about the original and I hope Amazon latch onto that and give us the kind of film that’s brought so much excitement and fun to so many people. . . . Anyway, good luck to them.

Ironies and reversals

I came down with something over the weekend that has contrived to keep me home mostly immobile today. I have, however, been able to read a little bit, and to reflect on several striking ironies in two of the books I’m reading right now.

First, a pair of reversals. From Nicholas Shakespeare’s Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, in a chapter discussing Fleming’s career hopping—diplomacy, reporting, stock trading—during the early 1930s, a seemingly aimless trajectory that looked especially unimpressive next to his older brother Peter, who was already a daring and accomplished travel writer:

As at Eton, Peter’s literary success thrust Ian back into the shade; only now, Peter’s shadow stretched in pretty well every direction.

For the next twenty years, Ian had to steel himself to be called the brother of writer Peter Fleming, as a decade before Evelyn Waugh had been the brother of Alec Waugh, after Alec’s controversial, best-selling novel The Loom of Youth (1917), written when he was still a schoolboy, had sent shudders of horror down many respectable British spines.

Like Ian, Evelyn had grown up in the slipstream of a successful elder brother. Then in the 1950s both Alec and Peter were to experience a dramatic reversal.

By the time of lan’s death in August 1964, it would be Evelyn Waugh and not Alec who had grounds to be considered England’s most eminent living writer—and Ian Fleming and not Peter, England's most popular.

Interestingly, Peter Fleming and Alec Waugh were both the older brother, and both outlived their (eventually) more famous sibling.

Second, cruel ironies. I’m also reading The Magic of Silence: Caspar David Friedrich’s Journey Through Time, a thematic, somewhat impressionistic study of Friedrich organized according to the four classical elements—fire, water, earth, air. Author Florian Illies includes numerous ironic incidents from the artist’s afterlife. Among them is this anecdote regarding Two Men Contemplating the Moon, which was narrowly saved from destruction and looting at the end of World War II:

Those Two Men Contemplating the Moon leave Dresden only very rarely. Once, early in the twenty-first century, they flew to New York because the Metropolitan Museum proposed to hang them, for the first time in almost two centuries, beside another Two Men Contemplating the Moon that Friedrich had painted about the same time, but for his doctor, who had been so enamoured of the original version that he accepted a copy of it as payment for his services. But, when the two paintings were finally reunited for the first time, no one could see them. Just on the day the ‘Moonwatchers’ exhibition was to open—11 September 2001—a handful of Islamist terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center. The age of Romanticism was over just when it was about to be reopened. On the evening of 11 September, no one in downtown Manhattan was able to contemplate the moon: dust and ash clouded the sky, and fear obscured the view heavenward.

The ironies are especially terrible and saddening in the first part of the book, “Fire,” and this is the worst of all:

In Leipzig in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a legendary collector of art and music, an unprepossessing building society clerk called Manfred Gorke. He scrimped and saved to purchase art treasures, which he horded in his Leipzig home. . . . Gorke was originally from Hirschberg, Silesia, a mountain town Friedrich had particularly loved; hence he felt a special connection with [Friedrich]. . . . And while dire financial straits forced Gorke to part from his paintings by Carus and Runge in the early years of the war, he would never give up his Caspar David Friedrichs.

As the fighting came closer, and the air raids grew more frequent, Manfred Gorke decided to bring his Friedrichs, yet unknown to art history, to the University of Leipzig to be photographed and safely stored. On the afternoon of 3 December 1943, he personally handed them over to the university. But just the next day, in the early morning hours of 4 December 1943, 400 British aircraft bombed Leipzig, passing over the city centre in three waves between 3.50 and 4.25. They dropped countless explosive and incendiary bombs, enough to set the whole city centre ablaze. The university quarter was levelled; the Department of Art History was burned to the ground; Manfred Gorke’s Caspar David Friedrichs were reduced to ash just twelve hours after being stored away.

And, after listing some of what was lost in the blaze, Illies notes a final awful irony: “Gorke’s flat, where the Friedrichs had hung until the afternoon of 3 December 1943, survived the war unscathed.”

Sometimes it’s remarkable that anything old has survived at all.