Tea at Trianon: When Ian Fleming Finally Began Writing His Novel

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, March 3, 2023

When Ian Fleming Finally Began Writing His Novel

From CrimeReads:

On the surface, Fleming’s life looked idyllic. It was 1952, and he was wintering in Goldeneye, a simple one-storey house near Oracabessa on the north shore of Jamaica. He had had this house built after the end of the Second World War, with the intention of using it as a winter writing retreat. It was quite an ugly, sparse building, to the eyes of those used to beauty and luxury, and it lacked basic amenities like cupboards, hot water and even glass in the windows. It did include a separate garage which served as staff quarters, however; although he saw it as a rough, rugged, masculine retreat, Fleming still wanted servants.

Outside Goldeneye, the views and the weather were as close to paradise as you will find on this earth. So too was the act of walking through the rough garden and taking the steps down to the beach, entering the warm clear water and snorkelling among the coral of the Caribbean. Fleming left London and came to stay at Goldeneye for three months every winter. His life, clearly, was markedly different to that of his fellow Englishmen who were born in the Dingle. It was not hard to see why it took him five years to start his novel.

Fleming was depressed and drinking heavily. He was also about to get married. His fiancée, Ann, was the love of his life and pregnant with his child, but this didn’t mean that he wanted to be married to her. He began writing, he later admitted, to take his mind off the ‘hideous spectre of matrimony’. A committed relationship requires a level of emotional maturity which he did not possess. Mutual friends suspected from the start that the marriage would be a disaster. As the playwright Noël Coward noted in his diary, ‘I have doubts about their happiness if [Ann] and Ian were to be married.’ (Read more.)