The James Bond Trap

Ian Fleming created the superspy and then couldn't get rid of him.

- James Parker

The next Bond movie should be called Libido of Secrecy. It should be called Marmalizer, Mercuryface, Die to Tell the Tale.

Actually—and I’m quite serious—it should be called The Black Daffodil, after Ian Fleming’s only book of poetry. Nicholas Shakespeare, in his walloping new biography, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, describes this slim volume, bound in black and self-published in 1928, as “the holy grail for Fleming collectors.” He was 20. He was arty. Shakespeare includes a contemporary sample from Fleming’s journal: “If the wages of sin are Death / I am willing to pay / I have had my short spasm of life / now let death take its sway.” We have to rely on the sample, because The Black Daffodil itself is gone. “He read me several poems,” Fleming’s friend and sometime business partner Ivar Bryce remembered, “the beauty of which moved me deeply.” But then something went wrong, or some other presence moved in. “He took every copy that had been printed,” Bryce continued, “and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames.”

Rather Bondlike, that “pitilessly.” Bondlike, too, is the “short spasm of life” in the little poem. In fact, although he wouldn’t be born for another 24 years, if you squint at the Black Daffodil episode, at this tiny debacle in the artistic life of Ian Fleming, you can indeed make out the wriggling germ of James Bond.