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Laurent Binet, HHhH, 2010

Laurent Binet's HHhH weaves together a strong history of the assassination attempt on Heydrich in WW2 (interesting telling of a terrible mind and time) with an account of its own making. So it's funny and self-absorbed - I think the English publisher reinstated some or all of his comments on Jonathan Littell that had been cut from the French edition. Fans of David Shields's Reality Hunger will love it, fans of Sebald may love it.

The highlights

In German, Nachrichtenoffizier means ‘transmission officer’, while Nachrichtendienstoffizier means ‘intelligence officer’. It’s because Himmler, notoriously ignorant about all things military, makes no distinction between these two terms that Heydrich – who used to be a transmission officer in the navy – is sitting opposite him today. [Location 725]

Having got wind that the head of the British intelligence service calls himself M (yes, like in James Bond), he decides in all seriousness to call himself H. [Location 743]

‘Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, “Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking”?’ She smiles as she reads this to me. I don’t immediately grasp the full meaning of the phrase and, faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk! Then I ask her to pass me the magazine and I reread the sentence. I am forced to admit that I would quite like to possess this kind of detail about Heydrich. [Location 753]

I’VE BEEN TALKING rubbish, the victim of both a faulty memory and an overactive imagination. In fact, the head of the British secret service at this time was called ‘C’ – not ‘M’ as in James Bond. Heydrich too called himself ‘C’, and not ‘H’. But it’s not certain that, in doing so, he wished to copy the British: the initial more probably referred to der Chef [Location 811]

‘Oh, really, it’s not invented?’ No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of ‘inventing’ Nazism? [Location 920]

In other words, when the Nazi leaders are – for once – ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honour and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes. [Location 1114]

So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is travelling through Nazi Germany by train. [Location 1125]

seeking the victims’ active cooperation. The Jews are always invited to make themselves known to the authorities, and in the vast majority of cases – whether for emigrating in 1938 or for being sent to Treblinka or Auschwitz in 1943 – this is exactly what they do. [Location 1173]

Chamberlain makes sure that his diplomats do not promise more than is contained in this muddled phrase: ‘In the event of a European conflict, it is impossible to know if Great Britain will take part.’ [Location 1259]

All he does is sniff the Nazis’ shit.’ [Location 1273]

Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week – one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. [Location 1303]

He was reportedly seen throwing himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Among people still hostile to Nazism, these demented fits quickly earned him the nickname Teppichfresser (‘Carpet Eater’). [Location 1326]

‘But, Mr Ambassador, in the end this agreement must be a great relief, no?’ Silence. Then the Foreign Office secretary sighs: ‘Oh yes, a relief … like when you do it in your pants!’ [Location 1357]

Churchill sums it all up with his immortal phrase: ‘You had to choose between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour. You will have war.’ [Location 1384]

All the synagogues are burning, but Heydrich, ever the professional, has ordered that any official records to be found in them must be sent to SD headquarters. Boxes of documents arrive at Wilhelmstrasse. The Nazis love burning books, but not files. German efficiency? Who knows if the SA didn’t wipe their asses with some of those precious archives … [Location 1435]

Two days later, Göring chairs a meeting at the Air Ministry to find a way of making the Jews bear the costs of all the damage. As the spokesman for the insurance companies points out, the price of broken windows alone comes to five million marks (this is why it’s called ‘Crystal Night’). It turns out that many of the Jewish boutiques are owned by Aryans, which means they must be compensated. Göring is furious. Nobody had thought about the economic implications, least of all the finance minister. He shouts at Heydrich that it would have been better to kill two hundred Jews than to destroy so much valuable property. Heydrich is upset. He replies that they did kill thirty-six Jews. [Location 1445]

I never thought of giving it any other title than Operation Anthropoid (and if that’s not the title you see on the cover, you will know that I gave in to the demands of my publisher, who didn’t like it: too SF, too Robert Ludlum, apparently). You see, Heydrich is the target, not the protagonist. [Location 1693]

I’m not sure yet if I’m going to ‘visualize’ (that is, invent!) this meeting or not. If I do, it will be the clinching proof that fiction does not respect anything. [Location 1821]

Essentially, the work of the Einsatzgruppen – a detailed written account of which would take up thousands of pages – can be summed up in three terrible letters: etc. Until they reach the USSR, at least: at that point, even et cetera’s suggestion of infinity will not be enough. [Location 1875]

Sonderfahndungliste GB, the special search list for Great Britain better known as the Black Book. It is a list of some 2,300 people to be found, arrested, and delivered to the Gestapo as quickly as possible. At the head of the list, unsurprisingly, is Churchill. Among the other politicians, British and foreign, are Beneš and Masaryk, representatives of the Czech government-in-exile. So far, so logical. But the list also contains the names of writers such as H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Rebecca West. Freud is there, despite having died in 1939. And Baden-Powell, too, the founder of the Scout movement. [Location 1919]

exclaims: ‘What do you mean, “The blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull”? You’re making it up!’ I have been boring her for years with my theories about the puerile, ridiculous nature of novelistic invention, and she’s right, I suppose, not to let me get away with this skull thing. [Location 2134]

but I don’t know what he was wearing on that particular day. He might just as easily have been in white, for example. I’m not sure if this kind of scruple still makes much sense at this stage. [Location 2202]

the SS – before shooting them – first made them descend to the bottom of the ditch, where a ‘crammer’ was waiting for them. The job of this ‘crammer’ was similar to that of an usher at a theatre. He led each Jew to a pile of bodies and, having found a suitable place, made him or her lie facedown, naked and alive, on top of naked corpses. Then another guard, walking on the dead bodies, put a bullet in the back of the neck. [Location 2245]

it has no place in my novel. But one of the great advantages of the genre is the almost unlimited freedom it gives the author. [Location 2254]

I’m worried that there are some errors in what I’ve written: since this subject has no direct link with Heydrich, I haven’t had time to investigate more deeply. But I didn’t want to write about Kiev without mentioning this incredible story. [Location 2286]

Finally, I will be something more than the Reich’s dustbin!’ The Reich’s dustbin: so that’s how he defined his duties as head of the Gestapo and the SD. [Location 2332]

Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory. No reader could possibly retain this list of names, so why write it? For you to remember them, I would have to turn them into characters. [Location 2943]

– a high-level German Abwehr officer called Paul Thümmel (code name A54; alias René). [Location 2979]

his letters: ‘It’s History, I know that. But if a novel is as boring as a scientific book …’ He also felt that he was writing ‘in a deplorable academic style,’ and then ‘what bothers [him] is the psychological aspect of [his] story,’ [Location 3036]

…’ This problem goes hand in hand with that of veracity: ‘As for my archaeology, it will be “probable”, that’s all. As long as no one can prove that what I’ve written is nonsense, that’s all I ask.’ [Location 3039]

Chacko’s art resides in his skill at integrating historical fact – Heydrich really was nicknamed the Blond Beast – into psychologically acute dialogue. It is through dialogue that he turns history into fiction. And I must say, loath as I am to use this method, that he does it very successfully: [Location 3070]

Sorry, I don’t have the faintest idea who this Gregory could be. And just so my falsely offhand tone doesn’t give you the wrong idea: I have tried to find out! [Location 3343]

This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up. I don’t think I’m going to keep it. [Location 3453]

The dog probably won’t have a decisive role to play in Operation Anthropoid, but I would rather jot down a useless detail than risk missing a crucial one. [Location 3510]

I WONDER HOW Jonathan Littell, in his novel The Kindly Ones, knows that Blobel had an Opel. If Blobel really drove an Opel, then I bow before his superior research. But if it’s a bluff, that weakens the whole book. [Location 3686]

THIS IS WHAT I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence. Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence [Location 3708]

the whole city seems to be covered in writing – and not only adverts. There are Vs everywhere: originally they were symbols of the Czech Resistance, but the Nazis appropriated them as an exhortation to the Reich’s final victory. There are Vs on tramways, on cars, sometimes carved into the ground; Vs everywhere, battling it out between two opposed ideologies. [Location 3720]

‘Better solutions, more advanced and more productive, are on their way.’ Then, his audience hanging on his every word, he adds abruptly: ‘All the Jews in Europe have been sentenced to death.’ [Location 3759]

How did I not see it before? Suddenly, everything is clear. The Kindly Ones is simply ‘Houellebecq does Nazism.’ [Location 3922]

I THINK I’M beginning to understand. What I’m writing is an infranovel [Location 3924]

Yes, I must travel to Prague. I have to be there when this happens. I have to write it there. [Location 3932]

I had to cheat sometimes, to betray my literary principles – because what I believe is insignificant next to what is being played out now. [Location 3950]

HE FIRES, AND nothing happens. I can’t resist cheap literary effects. Nothing happens. The trigger sticks – or perhaps it gives way too easily and clicks on nothing. [Location 4138]

When I quote an author, I must be careful to cut my quotations every seven lines. No longer than seven lines. Like spies on the telephone: no more than thirty seconds, so they can’t track you down. [Location 4178]

My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision. I flick through the photos of the funeral cortège crossing the Charles Bridge, going back up to Wenceslaus Square, passing in front of the museum. I see the beautiful stone statues on the balustrade of the bridge with swastikas beneath them, and I feel slightly sick. I think I’d rather take my mattress to the gallery in the church, if they’ve got a bit of room for me there. [Location 4731]

they do not anticipate the worldwide repercussions that will be provoked by news of the village’s destruction. Up to now, the Nazis, if somewhat halfhearted in the concealment of their crimes, have nevertheless kept up a superficial discretion that has enabled some people to avert their gaze from the regime’s true nature. With Lidice, the scales have fallen from the whole world’s eyes. [Location 4772]

All the same, no one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich’s death was good for anything. Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong. [Location 4799]

Everyone is playing for high stakes today, even on the German side, where a lack of results can easily look like sabotage to the leaders – all the more so when they have to conceal their own errors or quench their thirst for blood (and here both factors are in play). Scapegoats at all costs – that could be the Reich’s motto. [Location 4957]

Most of the time, the spy who accepted the offer to swap sides – even if he had until then resisted the worst kinds of torture – cracked very suddenly. From the moment he made his decision, he (to use Trepper’s memorable expression) ‘wallowed in betrayal as if in mud.’ [Location 5187]

‘Above all, do not attempt to be exhaustive,’ said Roland Barthes. There you go – some good advice I never took. [Location 5270]

Keith Ridgway, The Spectacular, 2012

Keith Ridgway's short story 'The Spectacular'. He seemed a bit ambivalent about it at the time but it's very good - a low-readership literary author decides to write a best-selling thriller about a terrorist plot at the London Olympics in order to rake the cash in, and gets embroiled in matters. His places are particularly resonant. My single highlight:

Guilt is always available. It just needs the stimulus of punishment to make itself known. [Location 501]

John Varley, Millennium, 1983

A DC-10 and 747 collide. In the distant future, a time travel team prepares to snatch passengers, leaving prefabricated smoking bodies behind. And an air disaster investigator will get a phone call that changes his life ... and the end of the world as we know it.

This is an old favourite - aircrash time-travel save-the-future SF. I like it because (1) the 1980s aircrash investigation milieu is interesting, (2) the protagonists are quite unsympathetic and they're enjoyably unreliable as narrators (in fact the whole time travel thing lets the unreliability of the narrator be performed and multiplied). And (3) the whole thing is a gigantic shaggy dog story on "deus ex machina".

Pin pages to the wall and examine them with binoculars

Truman Capote wrote lying down, as did Marcel Proust, Mark Twain and Woody Allen.

Charles Dickens, Winston Churchill, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Philip Roth, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Fernando Pessoa and George Sand all wrote standing up.

Roth also "walks half a mile for every page".

Roald Dahl wrote in a shed.

Philip Pullman used to write in a shed, but eventually gave it to an illustrator friend.

Umberto Eco has a converted church as his scriptorium. One floor has a computer, one has a typewriter, one in which he writes long-hand.

Haruki Murakami commutes into a city apartment in Tokyo where he writes.

After the publication of Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell came to the office at the The New Yorker magazine almost every day for the next thirty-two years without filing another word.

Dashiell Hammett published nothing after he was 39 - he felt he was repeating himself but never managed to find a new style he felt was good enough.

Ray Bradbury wrote an early version on Fahrenheit 451 in nine days on a rented typewriter in the UCLA library basement.

Will Self uses a wall of Post-It notes to plan and structure his writing.

Elmore Leonard writes on yellow legal pads.

Michel Faber corrected the first manuscript of The Crimson Petal and the White with house paint because he couldn't afford Tipp-Ex.

Gustav Hasford was a serial hoarder of very overdue library books, and had 10,000 of them in storage lockers.

Don DeLillo types each paragraph onto its own sheet of paper, so that he might concentrate better.

Gay Talese would pin pages of his writing to a wall and examine them from the other side of the room with binoculars.

Jonathan Safran Foer has a collection of blank sheets of paper.

Cormac McCarthy said that his perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper.

Ethan Canin copied John Cheever paragraphs out to learn what made the man's writing tick.

Anthony Trollope required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour.

J.G. Ballard, a fan of discipline in writing, prepared very long outlines and aimed for 1,000 words a day.

Walter Benjamin advocated delaying writing an idea as long as possible, so that it would be more maturely developed.

Richard Ford and his wife shot a book by Alice Hoffman, after she had given his book Independence Day an unfavourable review.

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How I work is I recap the material from the original How we work posts and the more recent links.

I am here / The best... totally shitty / Steve Jobs biography

Notes on Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, 2011.

“If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.” 

Despite the occasional dud product and brink-of-death corporate experience, it's impressive how Apple systemised the creation of excellent products and services. They do it by being brutally focused, by simplifying, by pursuing high quality and emotionally resonant products over short-term profit, by vertically integrating and tightly controlling the components, processes and experience as much as possible. All qualities to inspire.

The great products raised the design and desirability bar, uniting consumers in a high-end version of Warhol's dictum about mass-manufactured products - you know that Liz Taylor drinks Coke too ¹. There's a fair bit of honesty about earlier hardware products that weren't so insanely great, but less on the recent - there's nothing on the horrible spaghetti that iTunes bloated into ².

There is something interesting in the way that the act of selling is concentrated into Jobs himself ³, into his deal-making with Gates, Disney et al, and later the one-last-thing-ing at Apple's events, and to a lesser extent into the product itself, the adverts, the Apple stores. We don't read much about the analysts in Apple's sales and marketing organisations. But all that's to be expected in a biography.

Because its lens is the individual, a biography inevitably supports the great man theory ⁴ of management, in which a hero single-handedly achieves great things, often against the odds. The theory is common in management analysis today - Jobs the visionary - but is problematic: Asymco has a nice trio of posts querying the structural integrity of the great/stupid manager theory: Apple, Nokia, RIM. And indeed even within Apple the hero narrative rankled. Ive: "it hurts when he takes credit for one of my designs" ⁵.

People were either “enlightened” or “an asshole.” Their work was either “the best” or “totally shitty.”

Jobs was a very talented and driven man, but he was also capricious and troubled, and must have been very unpleasant to work for at times.

“He would shout at a meeting, ‘You asshole, you never do anything right,’” Debi Coleman recalled. “It was like an hourly occurrence.

Ive again:

there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and a license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. 

Now that we know the full story - the roller coaster and triumph at work and his illness and unfairly early death - it's tempting to re-interpret the narrative, to read Apple's products as the Freudian (solid state) death drive rendered in glass and aluminium, a collective memento mori in the cloud, the thanatological sublime. Or as the opposite: to describe his project as an attempt to make products that utterly transcend their ephemerality, denying their and his ultimate end-point ("I am here."). But neither would be correct: this was simply an intense man who believed in and for most part achieved the consumer electronic products he wanted.

Jobs's epiphany, 2005:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

But how terribly sad to have spent so little time with your wife and family. In pouring so much energy and attention into the work, a deficit was surely felt in life, at home.

“Why did you do it?” I asked. “I wanted my kids to know me,” he said.

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The footnotes:

1. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975: "What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it."
   Incidentally, Warhol and Keith Haring tried MacPaint at Sean Lennon's ninth birthday party in 1985 - Jobs had brought Lennon a Macintosh as a present. Warhol: "Look! Keith! I drew a circle!", but we don't know if the circle was perfect.
2. I'd hoped for but didn't get insight into the conversation about the apparent design disconnect between minimal hardware design and kitschy software design. A guess then: either Apple isn't as integrated and consistent as we'd all believe, or Apple unashamedly aims for that emotional resonance over a strict truth to the material.
3. Not from the Isaacson book, but Mossberg: "He could sell. Man, he could sell." - from Myslewski's The Life and Times of Steven Paul Jobs, 2011.
4. Heroic pre-history starts with the Greek myths, but Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes develops a theory of great men in 1841, Herbert Spencer's criticism of it fifty years later in The Study of Sociology is that the theory is obviously massively reductive, and he suggests that society maketh the man before the man can remake his society.
5. Although compare Tim Cook: "I've never given a rat's ass about that." 

 

Good books for SF readers

If you like science fiction, these are very well written books you might like - some of them SF, some not.

• Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness or Dispossessed
• Faber, Under the Skin
• Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt
• De Abaitua, The Red Men
• Mitchell, Number9Dream or Cloud Atlas
• Ballard, High Rise or Supercannes
• Calvino, Cosmicomics or anything he did really
• Ings, Weight of Numbers
• Borges, all of it
• Bester, Tiger Tiger (The Stars My Destination)
• Nabokov, Ada or Ardor
• Gloss, Dazzle of Day
• Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
• M John Harrison, Light
• Zamyatin, We
• Disch, Camp Concentration
• Delany, Babel-17 or Dhalgren

 

Art in London, Oct 2011 - Jan 2012 (updated)

(Note to self.) If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows:

Saatchi/C4's New Sensations' show The Future Can Wait, with James Jessop, closed 17 Oct. I was at art school with Jim, he's a strong painter.

Charles Avery at Pilar Corrias, til 12 Nov. It's a small but very good show - he's such a great and careful draughtsman. The gallerist told me that the big drawings take him a year and are all pre-sold. His world-making reminds me of Paul Noble (another good draughtsman - see below).

Charles Matton at AVA Annex, til 16 Nov (although the website since implies that it has already closed). Thanks to Tom Armitage for the pointer.

Friend Stuart Buchanan at Modern Artists Gallery (nb which isn't in London), til 19 Nov.

Martin Westwood at Stanley Picker, til 26 Nov.

Paul Noble at Gagosian, 10 Nov - 17 Dec.

Wilhelm Sasnal at Whitechapel, til 1 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Rothko paintings, til 26 Feb 2012).

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern, til 8 Jan 2012 (and while there see the Tacita Dean turbine hall installation, until 11 Mar 2012).

A Piece of Paper (group show) at Madder 139, 16 Nov - 14 Jan 2012.

John Martin at Tate Britain, til 15 Jan 2012.

Malicious Damage: The life and crimes of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell at Islington Museum, til 21 Jan 2012.

Leonardo Da Vinci at National Gallery, 9 Nov - 5 Feb 2012. Leonardo doesn't make me gibber the way that Velazquez does, but this is a truly rare event - it's the first time both Virgin of the Rocks paintings have been shown together, and probably the only time in your lifetime. You will need to book tickets.

ID card database destroyed (a Freudian impression)

A database built to hold the fingerprints and personal details of millions of ID card holders has today been publicly destroyed. Around 500 hard disk drives and 100 back up tapes containing the details of 15,000 holders have been magnetically wiped and shredded. They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process. [Home Office, 10 Feb 2011]

This story - the decommissioning of the ID Card database - immediately reminded me of Derrida and Freud. Bravo, Home Office. But here's one of the problems with data, databases and assurance: when the data itself is intangible and easily copiable, it's hard to evidence its destruction with any certainty. You might essay a metonymic evocation of the database with the material the data was stored on (and here's another example) or hold up a talisman:

Or place the means of destruction on stage. Better: ritualise the moment of destruction - with a gloved middle finger, Immigration Minister "Damian Green presses the button". ID confetti:

And then you'd need to destroy them again with a purifying flame, rendering pieces of disk platter jewellery into smoke: "They will soon be incinerated in an environmentally friendly waste-for-energy process."

Freud might call that the governmental mute death drive, attempting to destroy memory's archive, but without leaving any archival trace of its own (see Derrida on Freud, Archive Fever, 10). But the remainders are cinders or shadows, the ghost of the archive, smoke from its incineration, memory of the identity carte postale, and a new archive is immediately created.

Favourites at Frieze art fair 2010

 

Wilhelm Sasnal, Peter Peri, Lorna Simpson, Frederick Kunath, Robert Longo, Ged Quinn, Alex Buldakov, Stas Volyaslovsky, Keiichi Tanaami, Charles Avery, Thomas Struth, Seb Patane, Ariel Schlesinger, Walton Ford.

More here.

Bond: From Russia With Lunch

Notes from the City Reads Panel: From Russia With Love, 2 May 2010. Brighton's collective reading event - City Reads - took on Ian Fleming's From Russia with Love this year.

At the talk: Andrew Lycett - Fleming's official biographer; Simon Winder - author of The Man Who Saved Britain: a Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond; and Rowan Pelling - broadcaster, journalist and former editor of the Erotic Review. (Lycett is knowledgeable but seems a bit uncomfortable to be there. Winder is clever, entertaining, and his book is very funny.)

AL: IF was getting bore at the point of writing FRWL

SW: Bond's absence from the first half of the book - mythologising

RP: description of Red Grant: creepy, sexy

AL: Ann described IF's work as "pornographic nonsense". Didn't encourage IF, who wanted to write literary novels. Most successful is Casino Royale [really?!]. IF always felt he was competing with Ann's circle of literary writer friends.

SW: FRWL is for small stakes

Pleasingly ordinary, mundane. 

Is there a link between higher stakes and higher consumption? - Bond's consumption of drinks, cigarettes and food is extraordinary. The drinks mark him as a functioning alcoholic, the smokes must have announced him to his targets as the assassin with the tubercular cough, and the food... he'd be unable to move.

AL: FRWL shows a domestic Bond: jams at breakfast, fussy, camp

SW: IF obliged to be a tough-guy - bluff? 

SW: IF died alcoholic.

Fleming-Bond, wish-fulfilment.

SW: Gypsies in FRWL: "naked, trying to bite each other's breasts" - couldn't be portrayed in the film

AL: Bond as "blunt instrument of a government department" [and so very, very blunt!]

SW: structure of the books: great setups which then deteriorate terribly - often as if he reached a self-imposed page limit and then became indifferent

Leitmotif: the steady and inglorious decline of books, Fleming, empire, Bond...

AL: it's as if the process of writing the Bond novels directly contributed to his death [a weakening, dissipation] of old age [before his time], of smoking, drinking, of the emotional energy the books took [of the marital fights; Winder: "a thousand impacts"]

AL: Was writing FRWL as his marriage cracked up - had met his girlfriend Blanche in early 56

SW: Bond appearing to die in FRWL is unnecessary to the plot - so IF is toying with the idea of stopping by plotting Bond's demise...

SW: write from the point of view of someone in the catering office of the volcano lair in YOLT

RP: relates the drinking to that in Mad Men

And the timings fit: Bond, eg You Only Live Twice in Aug 1962 and Mad Men, series 2, in 1962. Imagine Bond as an ten-years-older Don Draper missing meetings, fretting about the missile-crisis era, drinking himself to death, slumped in the stalls of the executive floor toilet...

AL's biographic scoop was the revelation of IF's sado-masochistic whipping. 

AL: some say "M" is Mother 

Although Lycett sounds unconvinced of that, it perhaps chimes with the thread of sado-aberrant sexuality running through the books: sadism passim, what appear to be faint hints of homosexuality here and there, and the curious fact that all of the girls he really wants he can't keep.

Related: All that is solid melts into lair, The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne, I'm not angry.