The Spy Who Came In to Read Bond

Sean Connery as 007 in "From Russia With Love;' Richard Burton as Leamas in 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold'

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold — portrayed by film actor Richard Burton — remained cold to Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, at least at first.

“Another brilliant morning. I awoke at nine. I went to bed about nine and read a book of Ian Fleming’s called ‘You Only Live Twice.’ A clever schoolboy mind and atrociously vulgar. And every so often he stops his narrative to give little homilies about food, drink, national morals, etc., all of an excruciating banality. Yet ever since the phenomenal success of the films about his hero James Bond and the books — I’m not sure which came first — and of course his death, he is actually being treated seriously by serious critics.

“I put the light out about midnight and slept for a couple of hours, woke and read a short novel by Nathaniel West, ‘Miss Lonelyhearts.’ What a contrast between that and Fleming. West’s book is taut, spare and agonized while the other is diffuse, urbane and empty. West hates himself and postulates a theory that you are always killed by the thing you love, while Fleming loves only himself, his attraction to women, his sexual prowess, ‘the-hint-of-cruelty-in-the-mouth’ sadistic bit, his absurd and comically pompous attitude to food and cocktails ‘be sure the martini is shaken and not stirred.’

“He has the cordon-blue nerve to attack one of my favorite discoveries: American short-order cooking. I remember with watering mouth the soda fountain on 81^st Street, one block west of the park in Manhattan, where in a blur of conjuring the cook would produce corned-beef hash with a fried egg on top and French fries on the side and a salad with a choice of about four or five dressings. All this magically produced and whipped on to the table, piping hot, before you’d finished the comic strips in the Herald Tribune, or read Red Smith’s wry column.

“Yet you cannot help liking Fleming. He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingwayese, sadistic, sexually maniacal boy scout that in the end he becomes likeable. I rather like him too for his death line, if the reports are true. He was about 57 and had known for some time that he had a diseased heart. He is reputed to have said: “Well, it’s been a hell of a bloody lark.’ And of course, to that bon viveur, woman-chasing intelligently muscled mind it had been.”
— Richard Burton’s journal, March 28, 1969
I think, by the way, the Burton is conning us just a bit here. He knew more about the literary Bond than he could have learned from that one late novel, You Only Live Twice. And although he didn't often go to movies, Burton read hundreds of paperback thrillers, so he'd certainly run across Ian Fleming before, and must have been aware that the novels came a decade before the movies they inspired.