The Squid Who Loved Me

“A shining example, really, of the uneasy contract between the public and private (Ian) Fleming is the story about him flinging a squid at the novelist Rosamond Lehmann when she was staying at his home in Jamaica. In the version told by the writer Peter Quennell, Fleming did this to frighten Lehmann into leaving early since he was expecting the arrival of another lover. Lehmann’s less well-known account sheds a more satisfying light on the story.

“Lehmann came across the squid on the kitchen floor; Fleming had speared it, intending to have it for dinner. ‘As I looked at it,’ she recalled, ‘I suddenly caught its eye. It seemed to stare at me, and I felt for some reason that this was a creature every bit as intelligent as we were and that it was suffering terribly. So I persuaded Ian to throw it back in the sea. 

“He grumbled a bit and said, ‘How typical of a soft old pseudo-liberal like you. You may think nature is beautiful, but it is very cruel, very ruthless. Just you see. As soon as we throw the squid back, all the other creatures will go for it. Just you see.’ 

“So we did throw it in, and it was quite extraordinary, for suddenly this odd, grey, inanimate creature began to light up in the water until it was quite phosphorescent. Then it swam away as we watched and Ian was completely speechless. It was an incident I always intended to write about, but never have.”

— Nicholas Shakespeare, Ian Fleming: The Complete Man