Bottome The Lifeline

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-7398794-5-7
Verlag: Muswell Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Mark Chalmers, is 36, dark haired, athletic, keen on skiing and winter sports, speaks fluent French and German and has a taste for wine, food and women. It is 1938 and Chalmers, a master at Eton, is recruited by an old friend at the Foreign Office and introduced to his boss 'B'. Reluctantly he agrees to take on a covert mission for British Intelligence - to parachute into Nazi-occupied Austria and pass on vital information to a British agent. Chalmers has no intention of committing himself beyond this one job but once he reaches his destination, he finds himself sucked into the cause - fighting fascism with the Underground. First published in 1946, seven years before Bond's debut in Casino Royale, Bottome's hero shares many similarities with Ian Fleming's Bond in fact, It seems that Bond may not have existed without Bottome. It was at the school she ran in Austria with her ex-spy husband, Ernan Forbes Dennis, that she taught Ian Flemming, to write. 'A gifted and entertaining novelist' TLS.

Phyllis Bottome was a highly regarded prolific author in the mid 20th century. With her husband Ernan Forbes Dennis, a former diplomat and spy, she set up a school in Kitzbühel, Austria and it was there, after he was thrown out of Eton, that she taught Ian Fleming to write. Amongst her many bestsellers was The Mortal Storm made into a prescient anti-fascist film which became a Hollywood blockbuster starring James Stewart. She died in London in 1963.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bottome, Phyllis

Leseproben

Introduction

In 2016 we made a programme for BBC Radio 4 entitled “The Woman who invented James Bond?”[1] In it we explored a controversial claim, first made by the espionage writer Nigel West in the Historical Dictionary of Ian Fleming’s World of Intelligence (2009), that James Bond, one of the most famous fictional characters of the 20th century, was stolen from another writer, Phyllis Bottome, and was based wholesale on Mark Chalmers, the hero of her 1946 novel The Lifeline.

Chalmers, the hero of Bottome’s novel, is a 36-year-old, dark-haired master at Eton, signed up to work for British intelligence by Reggie, a friend who works at the Foreign Office.

After a meeting with “B”, the head of British Intelligence, Chalmers is despatched to the continent with a mission to communicate with a British sleeper agent, and a suicide pill in case it all goes wrong.

Chalmers is a keen aficionado of mountain sports, enthusiastic about fine food and wine, with an eye for a pretty girl. He also speaks fluent French and German.

Seven years after the publication of Bottome’s novel, the world would be introduced to a character named James Bond.

He’s in his late thirties. He is sent to the continent after a meeting with “M”, the head of British intelligence.

He is a keen aficionado of mountain sports, enthusiastic about fine food and wine with an eye for a pretty girl. He also speaks fluent French and German.

The apparent similarities between Chalmers and Bond are so great that Nigel West describes the relationship between the two novelists as “thief and victim.”

What you make of that thesis will determine whether you currently hold in your hands a neglected novel or a smoking gun. (Presumably the very flat Beretta .25 automatic with the skeleton grip James Bond carries in Casino Royale.)

The similarities between Mark Chalmers and James Bond would be intriguing if Fleming and Phyllis Bottome had never met. But the two knew each other. In 1927 after a troubled career at Eton and Sandhurst the young Ian Fleming was sent to the Tennerhof a small private school in the Austrian Alps run by Major Ernan Forbes Dennis and his wife, the novelist Phyllis Bottome.

The school followed an eclectic curriculum based on study of the German language, rigorous physical exercise and winter sports, and the psychological principles of Dr Alfred Adler, of whom the Forbes Dennises were admirers. (Phyllis would go on to become Adler’s official biographer.)

The teenage Ian Fleming who arrived at this curious Alpine reformatory needed help. Restless, rebellious, recklessly preoccupied by women and fast cars, Ernan Forbes Dennis wrote, “He was like a weathercock as one mood chased another … By the time he came to us, all he could really do successfully was to make a nuisance of himself.” Applying Adler’s theories, the Forbes Dennises diagnosed Ian Fleming as trapped in a cycle of neurotic competition with his brother Peter, who though only a year older was already successful and composed and would go on to become a successful travel writer.

But aside from the psychological theories two other important factors at the Tenerhoff influenced Ian Fleming. The first was that Phyllis Bottome encouraged the boys to write. Fleming’s first short story “Death, on Two Occasions,” written when he was nineteen, was written with Bottome’s encouragement, and critiqued by her.

The second was that Ernan Forbes Dennis had been a spy, and had worked for British Secret Intelligence in Marseilles and Vienna.

Pam Hirsch, the biographer of Phyllis Bottome, says the Forbes Dennises were vitally important figures for the young Fleming.

“Phyllis and her husband Ernan were a lifeline for a deeply troubled young man who might not have actually survived if he hadn’t had all their care, their love, and their writerly attention as well.”

After leaving the Tenerhoff, Fleming and the Forbes Dennises remained on friendly, if not particularly close terms. In 1937 Phyllis roped Fleming into arranging a lecture tour for Alfred Adler (a tour which would finish poor Adler off: in May that year he died of a heart attack on the steps of the Aberdeen Music Hall, surely a first for a member of the Vienna Circle.)

In 1947, the summer after The Lifeline was published, Bottome and Ernan holidayed in Jamaica and visited Fleming in his villa, Goldeneye. As was her tradition, she gifted him her latest novel.

In January 1952, Ian Fleming sat down at Goldeneye at his twenty-year-old Imperial portable typewriter, inserted the first page of the folio typing paper he had bought at a shop on New York’s Madison Avenue ten days before and started to type.

John Pearson, Ian Fleming’s biographer, described Fleming’s method; “… he had no notes, had made no preparations. He simply began to type in his cool, big, shaded room and for the next seven weeks he kept at it steadily.”[2]

Casino Royale, the book he had finished by March 18th, would introduce the world to James Bond.

Fleming’s literary technique was to populate his novels with observations, obsessions, and personalities drawn from his own experiences. What use did he make of Phyllis Bottome?

Read back to back, it is clear that Casino Royale and The Lifeline have similarities – especially their central characters. Chalmers’ age, height and looks square with those of Bond. We learn on page six that “Emotion always made him feel wary,” a sentiment that could certainly be applied to Bond.

But there are differences. Chalmers is not a professional secret agent. His background as a master at Eton makes him closer to one of John Buchan’s amateur spies, stumbling on a complex geopolitical conspiracy. “It was as if, from his static, intelligent twentieth-century life, he had fallen into a dark, fantastic, swiftly moving medieval stream.” Bottome’s novel is set in 1938, in a world teetering on the brink of chaos, but by the time it was published in 1946, the “new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science” Churchill had warned of in 1940 had been averted. Casino Royale looks forward – to a future in which British power can no longer be relied upon, and needs to be constantly asserted.

There is though one point at which the novels feel so close that they almost overlap.

Both The Lifeline and Casino Royale contain sections in which their heroes are brutally tortured, hover between life and death, and then re-enter the world aided by female characters whom they disliked at first before falling for. The language of these sections is so close that you could rip a few pages from The Lifeline, sew them inside the dust jacket of Casino Royale, and the narrative trajectory of the two books would continue unchanged.

Mark woke in a room full of light. Since there was light, he could not be blind, though his eyes were bandaged. He could still feel their savage thrusts against his lids. A long shudder shook him, but pain warned him not to let himself shudder again. He could not move his head or his legs. Fever and thirst filled his consciousness. All his body was in a dull bruised state of massive pain. He could hear Ida’s voice a long way off, saying over and over again, ‘Drink this! Drink this!’ but he could not tell what she meant until at last his throat swallowed, and his thirst slackened. He felt the touch of her hands, and heard her say, ‘It is all right now, Mark! It is quite all right!’ But afterwards nightmares, restless, endless nightmares came and went.

The Lifeline, Phyllis Bottome, 1946

You are about to awake when you dream that you are dreaming.

During the next two days James Bond was permanently in this state without regaining consciousness. He watched the procession of his dreams go by without any effort to disturb their sequence, though many of them were terrifying and all were painful. He knew that he was in bed and that he was lying on his back and could not move and in one of his twilight moments he thought there were people round him, but he made no effort to open his eyes and re-enter the world …

… A woman’s voice was speaking and the words gradually penetrated to him. It seemed to be a kind voice and it slowly came to him that he was being comforted and that this was a friend and not an enemy.

Casino Royale, Ian Fleming 1953

Then Mark Chalmers and James Bond have a very similar bedside conversation with a local contact, Father Martin and Rene Mathis respectively, in which they reflect not only on their own status, but on the nature of good and evil.

It is too curious to be a coincidence. We think it highly likely that Ian Fleming sat down to write Casino Royale with a copy of Phyllis Bottome’s The Lifeline on his bookshelf in Goldeneye, and that, whether consciously or not, drew the structure of the...