by Dr. Wesley Britton  

When Quantum of Solace was chosen as the title for Daniel Craig’s second Bond film, questions quickly circulated regarding the meaning of the phrase.  After all, Ian Fleming’s original short story was an unusual part of the OO7 canon.  First published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1959, “Quantum of Solace” then became one of five stories collected in For Your Eyes Only in April 1960.  However, James Bond wasn’t the central character.

In “Quantum,” the setting was the Government House in Nassau where OO7 had to spend a social evening as a courtesy to the island’s Governor.  After Bond says, "I've always thought that if I ever married I would marry an air hostess,” the Governor tells Bond the sad story of a former colleague he called Philip Masters who did just that.

In the tale, Masters met Rhoda Llewellyn on board a flight to London and the two were married in short order.  But after the bored Rhoda carried on a very public affair with the eldest son of a prominent Bermudan family, Masters' work deteriorated.  He suffered a nervous breakdown so the governor sent him to Washington to negotiate fishing rights with the US . And give Masters a break from Bermuda .  While Masters was gone, the governor's wife Scolded Rhoda who ended her affair.  When Masters returned, Rhoda seemed penitent and wanted to start again.  But the formerly mild civil servant was now cold as ice.  He took the extraordinary step of dividing their house in half so the couple would not need to speak to each other, an action Masters would have been incapable of before the affair.  After Masters returned to England without her, the former Mrs. Masters discovered the now ruthless Philip had left her penniless with no income nor saleable property.  Eventually, she gained sympathy from the community which had shunned her during her affair and she remarried.

According to some reviewers, this story was a reflection of Fleming’s own turbulent marriage, which was troubled by infidelity and periodic coldness.1  Perhaps this was reflected in one interpretation posted at “James Bond OO7 – News”:

At one point during the evening, the Governor of the Bahamas defines the ‘quantum of solace’ as a precise numerical notation of the amount of comfort and humanity that is necessary between two people if true love is to flourish.  When the ‘Quantum of Solace’ is zero, there can be no love.  Bond understands the concept fully, remarking at one point that ‘when the other person not only makes you feel insecure but actually seems to want to destroy you’ (i.e. the ‘quantum’ is at zero), then, reflects Bond, ‘you’ve got to get away to save yourself’.”2

Another view from the same post is that, “According to Fleming’s biographer Andrew Lycett, ‘Quantum of Solace’ was intended to depict the ‘harsh realities and emotional privations of colonial life in the tropics’.  At the heart of the tale, which is based on a story Bond is told at a dinner party one evening, is the question of boredom and alienation, and how to escape from this, which was something of a running theme throughout Fleming’s novels and particularly interested the author.  Fleming’s hero was often worried about going stale, as was Fleming himself.”  In fact, this stagnation had much to do with the publication of the For Your Eyes Only collection.  Feeling he didn’t have another Bond novel in him, Fleming convinced his publisher to issue For Your Eyes Only as a means to meet his contractual obligation for a Bond book that year.  His next book, Thunderball (1961) drew so much from script drafts written with collaborators Kevin McClory and Jack Whittingham that Fleming lost a plagiarism suit they filed against him in 1963.

While Wikipedia describes the original story as “experimental,” in fact the concept was actually borrowed from an important influence on Fleming, writer W. Somerset Maugham. In particular, in 1928 Maugham had published one of the watershed books of fictional espionage, Ashenden, or the British Agent.  Not a novel per se, the framework was a series of interconnected short stories about Ashenden’s life as a spy in Switzerland and Russia during World War I.  One of these was "His Excellency,” a clear model for Fleming's “Quantum of Solace.”3

W. Somerset Maugham

Like “Quantum,” Maugham’s character study is not directly related to espionage but rather involves a story Sir Herbert Witherspoon, the British Ambassador of an unnamed European country, tells Ashenden at a private dinner.  Ashenden is investigating Byron, a civil servant working at the embassy who is endangering his career when he becomes engaged to a music hall dancer with a questionable background.  After admitting Byron’s career is over, Witherspoon tells Ashenden  about the passionate pursuit  by a man he calls Brown—clearly the ambassador himself—of “Alex,” an acrobat in a vaudeville troupe 30 years before in Europe.  Witherspoon describes how fascination, then lust, then desperate love filled the young man while Alex performs from city to city with a series of lovers.

Alfred Hitchcock directed this 1936 movie based on Maugham’s novel "Ashenden".

Realizing he had no future with her, “Brown” became engaged to a young heiress he does not love but who is more akin to his station and able to assist his rising career.  When the girl goes off with her parents for three months before the wedding, Brown went to Paris and spent his final months of freedom following Alex and her troupe from performance to performance, demeaning himself by becoming their back-stage assistant.  Ultimately, the fiancée’ returns, Brown marries her, but is forever haunted by his passion for a woman he never saw again.  It is clear Alex herself was not alluring to him for her own merits—she is obviously not in love with him and will continue moving from relationship to relationship with no regrets.  But Alex and her lifestyle are exciting, exotic, a far cry from the boring monotony of an ordinary life.  While Brown’s career is successful, his marriage becomes cold and Witherspoon admits his life has been wasted.  In the end, Witherspoon tells Ashenden that Byron, the young man the agent is investigating, should be left alone.  According to Witherspoon, if Byron does not follow his heart, even if he seeks a mis-matched relationship likely doomed to be short-lived, he’d become bitter and consumed with regret that he did not pursue his great love.

While drawing too many parallels between “Quantum of Solace” and “His Excellency” might be overstating the literary influence Maugham had on Fleming, it is obvious more than the concept of Ashenden and Bond both being passive listeners to someone else’s memories connect the stories.  In both tales, Ashenden and Bond had completed missions and were obligated to spend an evening with a local government official who was uncertain about the goals and work of intelligence officers.  In both stories, the hosts narrated poignant accounts of a young civil servant at the beginning of their careers before being hardened by bad relationships.  In both stories, the agents are first disinterested before becoming engaged in a slice of life removed from their own worlds.  Both stories dealt with the banality of ordinary life juxtaposed against romantic desires that, when not fulfilled, lead to recriminations and bitterness.

Most importantly, as is typical of the best short stories in literature, both tales have a “moral to the story.” In “Quantum of Solace,” it is clear Philip Masters never recovered emotionally and never regained any spark of vitality.  After Bond learned Rhoda later married a rich Canadian, he said she hardly deserved such good fortune.  But the governor replied that Masters had been a rather weak figure and perhaps Rhoda had been Fate’s instrument to teach him a lesson.  In a flash of insight, OO7 realizes two of his dinner companions that evening had been Rhoda and her new husband, and now believes they weren’t as boring as he had thought.  In the concluding moments, Fleming points out that Bond’s missions paled in comparison with real-life human drama and Bond learns that superficial impressions don’t reveal any of the depths of human relationships.  Likewise, Herbert Witherspoon’s story ended up impacting Ashenden. In a later story, “The Traitor,” Ashenden muses over the situations of both Byron and his lady as well as Brown and Alex as he has to make a choice about what to do in another mission.  He too has learned what he sees in the lives of other people cannot be easily measured in absolutes of right and wrong.  He flips a coin to determine his next move, apparently deciding there was no moral imperative in determining the fate of a traitor to his cause.

Maugham and Fleming

Both writers clearly appreciated the other.  Maugham had praised Fleming in April 1953 after reading Casino Royale.  Maugham wrote Fleming saying he “. . . particularly enjoyed the battle at the casino between your hero and M. Chiffre.  You really managed to get the tension to the highest possible pitch."4  Later, Fleming publicly praised his mentor saying they were the only two authors "who write about what people are really interested in--cards, money, gold, and things like that."5  Both Ian and his wife Ann became close friends with Maugham, visiting him at his villa in the South of France.  Ann felt her husband adopted a “fawning Role” with Maugham and was struck by the similarities between the two writers.  Both liked exotic-smelling soaps in their bathrooms, and Ann had "a curious feeling that they both regarded 'women' with mistrust."6  It was Maugham who first declared that "martinis should always be stirred, not shaken, so that the molecules lie sensuously one on top of the other."7  In “His Excellency,” the fictional Ashenden states “To drink a glass of sherry when you can get a dry martini is like taking a stage-coach when you can travel by the Orient Express.”

Maugham relaxing on his settee

Fleming’s thoughts on Maugham and “cards, money, and gold” are interesting in the light of “His Excellency” and “Quantum of Solace.”  Maugham’s spy stories did not focus on any romantic glamour in the life of a spy.  In the main, Maugham is best remembered as essentially creating the first work of fictional espionage about disillusionment in the spy trade.  John Le Carre, for example, noted Maugham was “the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality.”8  Maugham made it repeatedly clear he believed that espionage is neither glamorous nor high-adventure.  Instead, as Frederick Hitz noted, Maugham introduced bureaucracy in fiction based on his war experiences.9  Some reviewers believe Fleming chose “M” as the designation for Bond’s chief in the spirit of “R,” Ashenden’s mysterious supervisor.  

From my Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction:

“These concerns were perhaps best illustrated in one early passage where Ashenden pondered what his chiefs were doing in London.  In his notes, Ashenden said, `their hands [were] on the throttle of this great machine,’ moving their pieces here and there, seeing the patterns woven by disparate threads.  They might be enjoying the excitement of espionage, but `the small fry" did not live the adventurous lives the public thought.’”10

This approach, in 1928, was no small departure from the spy literature of the previous two decades.  In the main, spy fiction—whether from E. Phillips Oppenheim, John Buchan, or Erskine Childers—was imaginative fare with little connection with actual spycraft.  For realism, readers had to look to non-fiction memoirs from agents recounting their adventures as in Sir Baden-Powell or Marthe McKenna.  Beginning with Maugham, spy fiction was elevated from often fantastic nonsense designed for British school-boys into a new genre of thrillers as in the works of Eric Ambler, Graham Green, and those who followed in the 1960s examining the Cold War with cynical eyes.

Still, “realism” is always an elusive term to nail down in any trend in fiction.  As Craig Arthur noted, “For all his eponymous spy’s interest in the modern trappings of existence, Somerset Maugham disliked the literary techniques of modernist fiction.  Defending the embellishment of his own World War One espionage activities in Ashenden, Maugham complained that fact is a `poor story-teller’; `it has no sense of climax and whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance.’”11  Maugham criticized modernist authors who considered that fiction should imitate life: “They do not give you a story, they give you the material on which you can invent your own.”  Likewise, as Arthur pointed out, Fleming also favoured traditional story-telling techniques, creating a fantasy world where there was always a beginning, middle and end, with “heroes who are white, villains who are black and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink” (from the blurb for the 1956 World Books edition of Live and Let Die.)  Later, Fleming observed, “In fiction, people used to have blood in their veins.  Nowadays they have pond water.  My books are just out of step.  But then again so are all the people who read them … uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds.” (the blurb to the Jonathan Cape first edition of Thunderball.)

Because of such claims, too often Fleming has been seen as merely being in the romantic tradition of the “Clubland” writers, adding “sex, snobbery, and sadism” to the old plotlines of a hero taking on over-the-top megalomaniacs.  Owen Dudley Edwards accused Fleming of merely elevating the thin stories of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu from the “crude to the lewd.”12  Without question, Fleming drew from his childhood reading of the likes of Buchan and Rohmer, but when he set out to write “the spy novel to end all spy novels,” he also tapped into his adult reading of Maugham and Eric Ambler that gave his characters and settings enough depth to inspire virtually every spy writer since.  True enough, few observers would accuse Fleming of being a writer drawing principally from his intelligence experience or attempting to dramatize the Cold War with any “high-brow” literary intent.  Still the spirit of Maugham was alive in the life and times of Fleming’s OO7, and his themes are perhaps best demonstrated in the short stories.

For example, moral ambiguities could be seen in characters not obviously agents of SMERSH or SPECTRE.  In “The Hildebrand Rarity,” Bond realizes Milton Krest had been murdered by his wife, but this law enforcement agent determined not to turn her in, seeing the punishment as fitting the crime.  In “The Living Daylights,” Bond decides at the last minute to wound rather than kill the Russian assassin “Trigger,” allowing himself to make a choice his boss would not have approved of.  Similarly, in “Quantum of Solace,” Bond’s mission had been to sabotage a gun running operation, an assignment he had taken on reluctantly as he sympathized with the Cuban rebels involved.  Starting the story in a cynical and disenchanted mood, he ends with an almost uplifting moment of insight that turned his outlook upside down. This is perhaps the major distinction between “His Excellency” and “Quantum of Solace”—James Bond discovers that there are surprises in the ordinariness of people whose lives are far removed from the hazards of his occupation.  Ashenden, however, allows his new lack of moral certainty to add to his growing sense of disillusionment with his work for the British Secret Service.  Small moments like these are best shown in the short story rather than novel, and Fleming clearly understood this from the tales in Ashenden.

So Maugham’s emphasis on human depth in his novels and stories seem an appropriate influence on the new direction in the OO7 film franchise.  Casino Royale gave us a James Bond wounded by the death of a love interest—Quantum of Solace will carry on this theme as OO7 seeks out Vesper Lynd’s killer.  Daniel Craig connected the title of his film with the original story saying, “For Bond in Casino Royale, he never had that [Quantum of Solace] because his love was taken away from him.  This movie is him trying to rediscover it.”13

As it happens, “Quantum” will also be the title of a new Ian Fleming collection from Penguin Books in August 2008—Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories.  For the first time, all nine OO7 stories from For Your Eyes Only, Octopussy, and Thrilling Cities will appear together, a very useful edition for new readers.  As part of the centenary celebrations of 2008, perhaps this anthology will inspire a new appreciation of the shorter nuggets in the OO7 canon as being literature interesting on its own merits and not merely as source material for the cinematic James Bond.

Notes

1. Macintyre, Ben. “Ian Fleming’s reflection on the limitations of love.” The Times, January 25, 2008 . Accessed: April 18, 2008.

2. James Bond OO7 – News. Accessed: April 25, 2008.

3. Some sources claim Maugham’s “Behind the Scenes” was the story with the ambassador’s reminiscences, but that short section only introduced the characters developed in “His Excellency.”

4. In “Ian Fleming on Crowley as a Spy” (posted March 4, 2007 ), it was suggested Maugham didn’t realize the characteristics of Le Chiffre were based on magician and would-be spy Aleister Crowley. “Maugham was an old acquaintance of Crowley, whom he had used as the model for Oliver Haddo in his own book entitled The Magician.”  Fleming may have thought of Crowley as he’d approached Fleming during World War II offering his services to British Naval Intelligence.

5. Allen, Brook. Rev. of Somerset Maugham--A Life by Jeffrey Meyers. New York Times Book Review.  March 14, 2004.  Late and Final Editions, Section 7, Column 1:9.

6. “Ian Fleming: The Man with the Golden Pen,” (From The Sunday Times, February 10, 2008) also discusses an idea Ian Fleming had regarding a newspaper series he thought would interest Maugham.

7. “Martini "shaken, not stirred" - The Truth.” Accessed: April 26, 2008

8. Miller, Laura. “Smiley's People.” New York Times Book Review ( 1/1/1985 to present); 6/ 6/2004, p39.  

9. Hitz, Frederick. The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage.  New York: Alfred Knopf. 2004.

10. Britton, Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction. Westport , CT : Praeger Pub., 2005.

11. Arthur, Craig. “James Bond Vs. The Devil With Thick Spectacles: Ian Fleming and the Conquest of the Irrational.  CommanderBond.net. Oct. 22, 2007. Accessed: April 26, 2008.

12. Paul Johnson's famous 1958 New Statesman article was where he coined the phrase, "sex, sadism, and snobbery."  In my Beyond Bond, I explore the human dimensions of Fleming’s Bond, especially in the latter books where he is worn down by the torture and physical and emotional wounds of his career.  In addition, I cite sources that claim Fleming’s use of technological marvels was less fanciful than in previous writers as the atrocities of World War II and the new atomic age created a new milieu in which what Bond encountered was at the very least, quite plausible.

13. See note 2.  

Dr. Wesley Britton is author of Spy Television, Beyond Bond: Spies in Film and Fiction, and Onscreen and undercover: The ultimate Book of Movie Espionage.  His forthcoming Encyclopedia of TV Spies will be published by Bear Manor Media later this year.  Many of his articles, interviews, and reviews about espionage in film, television, literature, and in fact are posted at Spy-Wise.