Human Bondage
I wrote this essay about the Ian Fleming short story Quantum of Solace in 2008. At the time, the story’s title had just been chosen as the title of the forthcoming Bond film, and there had been a lot of press about how ‘un-Bondian’ it was. The story is often compared to the work of Somerset Maugham, but without much explanation as to why. In the essay, I look at that a little more closely, as well as at what I think Fleming was trying to achieve with the story.
‘James Bond said: “I’ve always thought that if I ever married I would marry an air hostess.”’ So begins Ian Fleming’s short story Quantum of Solace, first published in Cosmopolitan in 1959 and reprinted a year later as part of the collection For Your Eyes Only. As with many of Fleming’s short stories, it is experimental – there is no space for our hero to foil the kind of major plot he does in the full-length novels, so instead Fleming treated his readers to an incidental episode in his character’s career – indeed, For Your Eyes Only was subtitled ‘Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond’ on its publication.
The events in Quantum of Solace are only secret, it could be said, because nobody would bother to find out about them. The action is slight, concerning the tragic plight of a British couple in Bermuda, the story essentially a piece of island gossip told to Bond by the governor of the Bahamas in the wake of a dull dinner party in Nassau. Fleming took many of the details from a real incident he had been told of by his mistress Blanche Blackwell, about a British couple called Clive and Elspeth Smith in Jamaica. Fleming kept the general drift of the real story, but relocated it to Bermuda and changed the couple’s names to Philip and Rhoda Masters.¹ However, for those expecting a James Bond story to contain excitement and danger (in other words, everyone!), none of this bodes well: an expat duffer telling stories about other expats with Bond reduced to the role of listener… Fleming was anxious at the time to sell film rights to his work, but it’s hard to think of elements less likely to attract such interest.
And yet the title of this story was used for the last James Bond film. Why? Was it simply because it was one of the few Fleming titles that hadn’t yet been used for the films? That may well have been a factor: Fleming’s name still has cachet, and the massive success of 2006’s adaptation of Casino Royale seems to have emboldened the films’ producers. But the concept of ‘the quantum of solace’ was also central to Ian Fleming’s work, and to its success. In the story, the phrase is used by the Governor to sum up the story he has just told Bond about the cruelty of a young husband toward his unfaithful wife:
‘The Governor paused and looked reflectively over at Bond. He said: “You’re not married, but I think it’s the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn’t care if the other is alive or dead, then it’s just no good. That particular insult to the ego – worse, to the instinct of self-preservation – can never be forgiven. I’ve noticed this in hundreds of marriages. I’ve seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I’ve seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster – all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I’ve thought about this and I’ve invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace.”’
Fleming was appealing for compassion in human relations, for warmth and intimacy – and perhaps for understanding from his own wife, Ann, with whom he had an increasingly turbulent relationship. Bond, who throughout his previous adventures Fleming had repeatedly described as cold and ruthless, and who earlier in this same story appeared laconic and jaded, responds with surprising sensitivity, immediately dropping his customary mask and taking up the Governor’s theme:
‘“Yes, I suppose you could say that all love and friendship is based in the end on that. Human beings are very insecure. When the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you, it’s obviously the end. The Quantum of Solace stands at zero. You’ve got to get away to save yourself.”’
Cold, ruthless Bond is also, of course, the first to fall for a beautiful woman, and before long he did marry (albeit a countess rather than an air hostess). And that is perhaps a large part of Fleming’s enduring appeal: despite the weight of criticism judging him to be a sado-masochistic misogynist, there is a streak of romanticism in his work, and a consistent focus on what Graham Greene would later call ‘the human factor’. It is an oddity that those who condemn James Bond as a super-heroic fantasy figure with no relation to real life sometimes complain about a story in which Bond doesn’t go on any fantastic adventures. The poignancy of Quantum of Solace is that it shows how the seemingly mundane can be more powerful than the highest melodrama. ‘Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow,’ Bond thinks to himself at the end of the story. A half-hearted mission to stop some Castro rebels now seems ‘the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper’:
‘He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real violence – of the Comédie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments.’
The reference to a newspaper comic strip may be a pointer to Fleming’s motivation for writing the story – the Daily Express had started running comic-strip adaptations of the Bond novels a year earlier. Fleming had initially been reluctant, fearing that such a move might lower his literary credibility. Quantum of Solace may have been his response to Bond’s growing success, and an attempt to move a character he was increasingly losing control over in another direction. Structurally and thematically, it recalls the work of the British writer William Somerset Maugham, who Fleming both knew and admired. To summarise: it is a story within a story, told by a British official in the tropics at a dinner party, about a tragic love affair, which shows how cruel love can be, with the pay-off that appearances can be deceptive and that even the dullest most respectable-appearing people may have extraordinary life-changing dramas hidden in their past. Many of Maugham’s short stories contained several of these elements: A Casual Affair, A Point of Honour, The Colonel’s Lady, Appearance and Reality, and His Excellency, for instance. In The Happy Couple (first published in Cassell’s Magazine in 1908), the narrator attends a dinner party near Cap Ferrat at which he is introduced to a Mr and Mrs Craig. He finds them somewhat shy and dull. Mr Craig faints and his wife follows him to clean him up – in their absence, one of the other guests, a judge, tells the tale of who they really are. The story ends like this:
‘“The real names of Mr and Mrs Craig are Dr and Mrs Brandon. I am just as certain as I am that I'm sitting here that they committed between them a cruel and heartless murder and richly deserved to be hanged.”
“What do you think made the jury find them not guilty?”
“I’ve asked myself that; and do you know the only explanation I can give? The fact that it was conclusively proved that they had never been lovers. And if you come to think of it, that's one of the most curious features of the whole case. That woman was prepared to commit murder to get the man she loved, but she wasn't prepared to have an illicit love-affair with him.”
“Human nature is very odd, isn't it?”
“Very,” said Landon, helping himself to another glass of brandy.’
One could say that Quantum of Solace is heavily inspired by this story, but variations of it are found across Maugham's writings. Reading some of his early short stories, one is conscious of the fact that Fleming did not simply mimic his style but took it somewhere else entirely. Quantum of Solace is an important part of Fleming’s canon partly because it serves as a counter-balance to the rest of his work. Without it, one could arguably see all Bond’s missions as the stuff of cheap adventure strips (and indeed, many have done and continue to do so regardless). But once one has read the story, Bond becomes a much more human and moving figure – no mere ‘cardboard booby’, as Fleming once disparagingly called him. As a result of Bond reflecting on the unreality of his mission here, his other adventures seem more real. The story deftly reverses the traditional relationship between author and reader in ‘escapist’ literature. Fleming effectively tells us that our own lives are far more interesting than Bond’s, and Bond in turn longs to escape into our world.
Perhaps another layer still is the relationship between Fleming and Bond – what was their quantum of solace? Fleming famously felt constrained by his character as his work progressed, and frequently tried to ‘destroy’ Bond. This usually meant his physical person, as in the shock ending of From Russia With Love. But here Fleming purposefully set out to destroy Bond’s popular image, by denying readers the Bond they were now clamouring for.
The governor’s speech, therefore, is a statement of philosophy from a writer who was already becoming tired, both of life and the formula of his art. Fleming was attempting to take Bond somewhere he had not been before. Not a jungle in South America or the wastes of the Arctic, but somewhere internal: ‘the book of real violence’, human emotions. It may be a failed thriller story because Bond is essentially inert, but it is a successful Maugham-style story because it is infiltrated by Bond. There is a friction between the two worlds that gives the tale that satisfying crunch of interlocking ideas that should conclude every short story.
Fleming never really returned to the experiment he began in Quantum of Solace; although James Bond became an increasingly human figure in subsequent adventures, they were all nevertheless adventures in a way this story defiantly was not. However, the message at the heart of Quantum of Solace informs all his work, and was also key to the revitalising of the character in the 2006 adaptation of Casino Royale, in which we were presented with a James Bond desperate to connect with his own humanity through his relationship with Vesper Lynd. The short story was not directly referenced in the film that took its name, although traces of the Masters’ destructive marriage can perhaps be seen in the relationship between Camille and Dominic Greene. But the spirit of the story – Bond’s realization that human warmth is elusive in his cold spy’s world – runs through both of Daniel Craig’s films. As well as being a respectful nod to the creator of James Bond, the ‘rather high-sounding title’ was also a very astute recognition of one of Ian Fleming’s signature themes.