Continuing our discussion of the book Octopussy, an anthology published posthumously with four short stories. This is the fourth.
THE BOOK: OCTOPUSSY
The story: "007 IN NEW YORK"
The Year: 1966
The Author: Ian Fleming
THE PLOT
James Bond arrives in New York to inform a former colleague that her boyfriend works for the KGB. His official duties won't take long, so he plans what he will do with his spare time in New York, fantasizing about meals, restaurants and a date with an old girlfriend.
THE COMMENTARY
The mission is the set-up, and the punchline is the last paragraph. In between is the body of the story, which is devoted to Bond's favorite foods, places and activities in New York. Among them are:
- Carey Cadillac: This is now Carey International, which bills itself as "the premier provider of worldwide executive transportation services."
- King-Sized Chesterfields: This was Bond's preferred brand of cigarettes when he ran out of Morland Specials in the U.S.
- Central Park: Bond mentions it as survivor of his former favorite haunts, listing Harlem, Washington Square and the Battery as places where "you now need a passport and two detectives" to visit. Is this a result of Live and Let Die criticism?
- The Astor: Actually not a favorite place, but one that, like the Carlysle, will do. Bond's favorite hotels are gone. He lists the Ritz Carlton, the St. Regis and the Michael Arlen.
- The Savoy Ballroom: It was a large ballroom for music and public dancing in Harlem, which closed in 1958. "What fun it had been in the old days!" Man, Bond is really sounding like cranky grandpa here.
- Owens toothbrushes: This company still exists and is somehow related to Oral-B.
- Hoffritz Cutlery: Bond got his Gillette-like (but not Gillette) razors here. Felix Leiter gave Bond a Hoffritz razor as a gift in The Man with the Golden Gun. Hoffritz still exists; it even got a mention on Seinfeld.
- Brown eggs: He likes them better than the white ones, but thinks they are hard to find in the U.S.
- Tripler's: I can find no mention of this place online. Bond wanted to get "French golf socks made by Izod" there. A sporting goods store? A department store? Unknown.
- Scribner's: Bond calls it "the last great bookshop in New York." The Scribner's bookshops were bought by Barnes & Noble. Scribner's the publisher was bought by MacMillan, which was bought by Street & Smith. It's a good thing Fleming didn't live to see Amazon wipe out bookstores.
- Abercrombie's: He wanted to "look over the new gadgets." There was a second attraction:
- Solange: She's an employee in the Indoor Games Department who apparently will have sex with Bond whenever he's in town. After a date, of course.
- Lutece: Bond calls it "one of the great restaurants in the world." It closed in 2004.
- 21: Bond thought the prices too high and the food not as good, but he'd go for drinks "for old times' sake." It still exists.
- Grand Central Oyster Bar & Restaurant: Bond thought its oyster stew (with Miller High Life) was the best meal in New York. It still exists.
- The Edwardian: This restaurant at the Plaza Hotel still exists, but is only available for private events. Bond was going to have drinks there.
The Triborough Bridge: Bond calls it a "supremely beautiful bridge." And yes, it still exists.
Bond complains internally about many things that had changed in New York, and many of the current trends and fads. At any minute I expected him to tell the kids to get off his lawn.
But he has heard that there are "blue films" with "sound and color" that he's interested in exploring, ones where "your sex life will never be the same again." (I'm glad Fleming didn't live to see Pornhub.) He was also interested in checking out BDSM places he'd heard about from Felix (although he didn't use that wording).
STRAY BULLETS
- Bond is sent to inform a former colleague, a "nice girl, who had once worked for the Secret Service, an English girl now earning her living in New York" that her live-in boyfriend works for the KGB. It's adapted for the movies at the end of Quantum of Solace, when Daniel Craig's Bond tells Corrine Veneau (Stana Katic), who works for Canadian intelligence in Russia, that her boyfriend Yusef Kabira (Simon Kassianides) works for Quantum and seduces female agents for information. It was Kabira who seduced Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), and is indirectly responsible for her death. Bond doesn't kill Kabira, surprising M. He has apparently learned a lesson about the futility of revenge.
- The girl with whom Bond apparently has a standing date for whenever he's in town is named Solange. The girl in Casino Royale that Daniel Craig's Bond seduces and discards — and who ends up murdered by Le Chiffre — is named Solange Dimitrios (Caterina Murino).
- Bond notes that Solange is "appropriately employed" in the "Indoor Games" department of Abercrombie's. That's about as close as Fleming's Bond gets to the double intendres so plentiful in the movies.
- I wonder if the New York Zoo really did lack a reptile house in 1966.
SUMMARY
A short, shaggy dog of a story, all in service to a not very good punchline.
THE MOVIES
Replies
I have never read "007 in New York" although now I wish I had. It was written for The Sunday Times and did not appear in a James Bond book until 2002. When I worked for TWA back in the '90s, New York City was my most frequent day-trip. I had a list of places I wanted to visit (some from a guidebook but some from Marvel Comics), and I would have loved to have read this story back then. (The mid-'90s was also the last time I read through all 14 Bonds in sequence.)
Carey Cadillac: This is now Carey International, which bills itself as "the premier provider of worldwide executive transportation services."
I used to take the Carey Bus from LaGuardia airport to Midtown, and I would catch it back from the Port Authority bus terminal. It was reliable and cheaper than a cab, but I laughed out loud when I read it described as "the premier provider of worldwide executive transportation services."
Brown eggs: He likes them better than the white ones, but thinks they are hard to find in the U.S.
James Bond (or Ian Fleming) has never visited the Midwest.
"Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh!"
The Octopussy paperback I bought for this project didn't have "007 in New York," so I bought a Kindle copy that did. They're cheap, if you want to go that route. It's very short.
"Brown eggs are local eggs, and local eggs are fresh!"
What's this from? Local ad?
Yeah, I used to hear it all the time years ago. It was a New England thing.
This being the last of Ian Fleming's published works, and the end of my book/movie project, I feel like some sort of coda is in order.
I have to say that the books were a sea change from the movies. Fleming's Bond is far more human than the action hero in the Roger Moore movies, who knows everything and knows how to do everything and you never really worry about him. It's almost a cartoon. But the dialed-down super-powers in the book are a plus in many ways, as this Bond is less one-dimensional: He occasionally falls in love, seems sometimes to be in genuine peril, sometimes needs help (and a lot of it), gets depressed, has genuine friendships (Felix) and even muses on death. These are things the movie Bond eschews, and the print character is better for it.
And where the movie Bond always knows everything he needs to know -- geography, languages, every kind of firearm, etc. -- the book Bond has an established set of skills that re-occur. For example, he's good at cards, a theme that re-appears consistently in the books. He's fluent in French, German, Italian and Russian, and has a smattering of Greek, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish (he was first at Oxford in "Oriental" languages). But he knows no Arabic languages, and one imagines the Chinese he knows is only Mandarin. A hero who is limited makes for a more believable character, and more dramatic situations.
A more human Bond is also a minus in some ways. The print Bond is such an obvious avatar for Fleming himself, that Bond's opinions and attitudes reflect those of a man, like Fleming, who was born at the turn of the last century. Fleming's ethnocentrism, racism, misogyny, deference to authority, conservatism, resistance to change and pre-war boosterism for empire are all on full display with Bond, a character who is decades younger than Fleming. As I've occasionally noted, Bond -- supposedly in his 30s or 40s -- occasionally sounds like somebody's cranky grandpa.
Thanks to Fleming, we now associate heavy drinking, heavy smoking and bed-hopping as essential attributes of a secret agent. That is slowly changing, as other secret agents without those attributes gain prominence (Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, Natalia Romanoff) and as society itself begins to see them as faux pas, if not vices. These behaviors were perfectly in keeping with the mores of the macho '50s, from whence Bond sprang, but have since been recognized as unhealthy and unwelcome. From our 21st century standpoint, we find it a bit implausible that Bond is such a high-functioning alcoholic in his very dangerous world, and we know that his original three-pack-a-day habit would cut down on his athleticism, if it didn't result in cancer or upper-repiratory problems. They were the very behaviors that would cost Ian Fleming his marriage, and eventually his life. Reading Bond is a trip down memory lane, but the reader isn't necessarily nostalgic for all aspects of that that world.
The latest Bond, Daniel Craig, reflects modern updates from the previous versions in many ways, but not least of which is smoking and drinking in moderation. His bed-hopping, too, isn't automatic -- he does occasionally seduce women who have information he needs, and then he discards them (See: Solange). But he's not in it for the lulz, usually, and he does search for, and sometimes finds, genuine connection (Vesper Lynd, Camille Montes, Madeleine Swann).
Another aspect of the Fleming books which surprised me is how little the stories there connect with genuine espionage. I was expecting John le Carré or Robert Ludlum, but Bond's missions are more often against comic book criminals than Spy vs. Spy. I loved From Russia, with Love for its direct connection to the Cold War, but was less thrilled with mad scientists like Dr. No and gangsters like Blofeld and Goldfinger. And I really would have liked to see more stories set in the East/West divide of Europe, and fewer in Jamaica.
So ends my Ian Fleming odyssey. This project has reached its natural end point, and while I'm somewhat sorry to see it end, I can now move on to the post-Fleming books without taking notes and writing commentaries. It will be, in short, less of a job.
There are still four Bond movies I haven't seen, those starring Pierce Brosnan. My wife is iffy on the prospect and, after a Bond break, I'll see if she can be convinced to watch them with me. If not, I'll have to do so on "my own time." There may be bits and bobs that refer back to the Fleming novels, but I doubt it's enough for a post.
Godzilla Minus One winning an Oscar made me think of how the Big G is one of the Twentieth Century's fictional characters that has survived into the Twenty-First Century, and could well go on indefinitely. Goji is basically a dragon in modern dress, and the Monster That Cannot Be Harmed By Ordinary Weapons is an archetype that has survived thousands of years.
I suspect that Bond-As-Fleming-Wrote-Him would not have survived the changes in people's sensibilities, but that Bond-the-Dashing-Hero-Who-Outwits-His-Enemies is more adaptable to changes in sensibilities than, say, Tarzan. Drinking, smoking and womanizing aren't inherently necesssary characteristics of such a character like Bond.
Godzilla Minus One made me think of how the Big G is one the Twentieth Century's fictional characters that has survived into the Twenty-First Century, and could well go on indefinitely. Goji is basically a dragon in modern dress, and the Monster That Cannot Be Harmed By Ordinary Weapons is an archetype that has survived thousands of years.
Also, Godzilla has the "hubris of man coming back to bite him" element, what with the atomic bomb and all, which goes back in literature as far back as literature goes. He's also a metaphor for Mother Nature's fury, which we are experiencing in outsize form in this era of climage change. There's also Godzilla as reminder that man isn't such a hotshot that he can't be taken down a peg. Godzilla may be a big green monster, but there are subtle (and some not-so-subtle) cultural layers to his appeal, some of which are universal. I loved the big green monster as a boy 'cause he tore things up, but as a grown-up, I find Godzilla-as-metaphor even more scary. We have met the enemy, and discovered our arrogance created him.
I suspect that Bond-As-Fleming-Wrote-Him would not have survived the changes in people's sensibilities, but that Bond-the-Dashing-Hero-Who-Outwits-His-Enemies is more adaptable to changes in sensibilities than, say, Tarzan. Drinking, smoking and womanizing aren't inherently necessary characteristics of such a character like Bond.
I suspect you're right. Fleming was, in a way, normalizing his own vices by making them endemic to his protagonist. They didn't survive Bond becoming an international movie star, where the sensibilities of other cultures, and the passage of time in Fleming's own, necessitated their fade-out. And espionage will always be with us, so episodes in that hidden world, running parallel to our own but unseen, is also rife with metaphor and meaning. And the adventure aspects are exciting to those of us who don't have to do it.
Re: Tarzan ...
I have figured a way to update The Phantom for the 21st century, and it starts with many of the Phantoms having taken an African wife over the decades (that we just didn't know about, and maybe an Indian, Arab or Chinese woman or two). The modern spawn of The Phantom shouldn't be entirely white, which will not only eliminate the "white savior" aspect of the strip, but is practical in that the mocha-colored extended family of the Ghost Who Walks (which should be huge) would have little trouble maneuvering throught mostly black Africa, and, in fact, might even hold positions of authority -- whether legitmately, or as an undercover assignment. I'd peg the Phantom that married Diana Palmer as the last who acted as a single vigilante on a horse, and his children as the ones who come up with the network when faced with modern genocide, deforestation, the potential loss of Skull Cave, the pygmies finding better ways to spend their time than serving a white man, etc. All that gold, jewels and money in the physical Skull Cave could be deposited and invested, and Phantom Inc. -- they wouldn't call it that, of course -- could finance a worldwide anti-crime, anti-pirate, African peacekeeping network off the dividends. The whole Phantom operation would be digital, including the stories of the earlier Phantoms, and just as elusive as ever to anyone trying to find the Ghost Who Walks.
And, yes, there should be a lot of Phantom children, all mixed into various African societies, all connected to a network leading back to "Skull Cave," which could be anywhere they set up a HQ or nodes (not necessarily a single, vulnerable position). In short, The Phantom shouldn't be a single guy in tights, but a network -- and a family -- working behind the scenes to create a better Africa and keep the peace. Needless to say, they'd keep the legend going of a Ghost Who Walks with various tricks and shenanigans, which has always been one of the fun bits for the reader.
When it comes to Tarzan, though, I have yet to think of a way to modernize the character for today's sensibilities. He's "white savior trope" through and through, who needs a dark, primitive and unexplored Africa in which to find various lost civilizations, and a superstitious, cowardly black population to cow. If you re-write the character as a modern black man, he's a different character -- B'wana Beast, in fact. Tarzan is a character created and shaped by events and sensibilities more than 100 years old and completely out of step since de-colonialization, and I just don't see a path forward for him. He's an artifact of an earlier age, and should stay there.
Of course, I am a bear of very little imagination, so maybe somebody else has an idea.