Ian Fleming by Andrew Lycett

Author:Andrew Lycett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2023-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

9

Escaping the “gab-fests”

1953–1956

A neat front-page box in the Sunday Times proudly announced the appointment of a new Atticus, the paper’s leading columnist. “Many distinguished men – politicians, authors, journalists – have worn the secret mantle of Atticus”, it trumpeted in November 1953. This one was making his debut “under a title of his own choosing” – ‘People & Things’. It was an appropriate, if uninspired, designation for a man stepping into the shoes of John Buchan and Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart. For while “people” have always been the staple of columns, “things” marked this one out as the work of Ian Fleming. Ian had a real journalist’s love of facts. One reason he disliked Ann’s smart friends was that they gossiped and spoke in riddles. He later told Nicholas Henderson, who became British Ambassador to France and the United States, that he was only interested in people with technical knowledge. He gave another friend an example of a really fascinating afternoon: it would be spent discussing silage. And he once railed against a dinner table of ‘fuddy-duddies’ that the craftsmen responsible for the cherished brass pictures on his walls would provide much better company than “all you lot”.

Ian had manoeuvred skilfully for the Atticus job. Two years earlier he had annoyed Harry Hodson by going above his head to Lord Kemsley to bring about the dismissal of the then incumbent, Sacheverell Sitwell, whom he considered too whimsical and literary. Now, with his own Mercury service running down, he needed a new platform, and his lines of communication to the proprietor were still strong enough to secure it.

Having recently visited the United States, Ian devoted the lead item in his first Atticus column on 22 November to the theme of militant anti-communism he had tackled earlier in the summer. This time he reported how Senator Joe McCarthy’s hordes had attacked the United Nations as an annexe of Moscow. Ian thought this “current prairie fire of fear, intolerance and hatred” was ridiculous, and said so. In Atticus the following week he returned to this topic. If people wanted to know the truth about any anti-American activities, they should ask J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. The fact that Hoover was not being asked, inferred Ian, suggested that he was part of the Red-bashing conspiracy.

Before long he had let slip one of the secrets of being a columnist – “the ability to write something out of nothing across the maximum space in the minimum time”. Often willing to laugh at himself, he admitted he had done as much in his acerbic reply to an attack on pseudonymous columnists in Strix’s Notebook in the Spectator. Few readers realized he was indulging in light-hearted banter with his brother, Peter, who wrote Strix. Ian managed to pull Peter up for “illiterately” describing such pseudonyms as “noms de plume” and revealing that this same Strix “has a fixation about pseudonyms dating from the cradle, in which he was known as ‘Pudding’.”

Ian’s Atticus columns, which ran

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