The Devil With James Bond

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THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

ThE Devil

wrrk JAMES BoNd!

BY ANNS. BOYD

JOHN KNOX PRESS

Richmond, Virginia

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard
Version of the Bible, copyrighted 1946 and 1952.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Christian Century Foundation,
who originally published "James Bond: Modern-day Dragonslayer" (May 19,
1965). Quotations from Casino Roy ale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker,
Diamonds Are Forever, Doctor No, and Goldfinger are used by permission
of The Macmillan Company; from Thunderball by permission of The Viking
Press; from You Only Live Twice, The Man with the Golden Gun, and
On Her Majesty's Secret Service by permission of The New American
Library, Inc.

Second printing

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 67-10605

M. E. BRATCHER 1967

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

J. 4259

Dedication

To Dick and the children

Nancy, Janet, John, and Laura
who suffered through a year of
"bond-age" with me.

And to our parents, who trusted
that no news was good newsl

PREFACE

It is somewhat ironic to admit that this book is the result of
having gone to see the movie Goldfinger last year as a break be-
tween semesters in my work as a graduate student at Drew Uni-
versity.

What had begun as an evening's relaxation to celebrate having
completed two seminar reports soon resulted in months of free-
lance research all because my initial reaction to the movie was
that James Bond was like a modern version of a knight. Since I
was anxious to compare the contemporary adventures of secret
agent 007 with the various aspects of medieval knighthood, I be-
gan buying and rereading the Fleming books in chronological
order.

The way I began was probably the best way to read Bond
silting up all night on a hot, crowded, stuffy coach train going
cross-country in bad weather after my plane flight had been
grounded. By the time my silent seat companion had shifted into
the seventh yoga-like position trying to find some combination in
which to stay asleep, I was off in Fleming's "never-never-land"
and even regretted the train's arrival in New York City. By that
time I had discovered the chapter on evil in Casino Royale and
the word "accidie" in Mister Big's first speech in Live and Let
Die, and the hunt was on. A month later I found Fleming's fore-
word to The Seven Deadly Sins, which served as a convincing argu-
ment for me that Ian Fleming had indeed had a great deal more in
mind when he began his "spy story to end all spy stories" than he
had originally admitted. Soon my part-time fascination grew into a

10 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

full-time preoccupation (as much as my family and other responsi-
bilities allowed). My initial questions soon grew into an article in
The Christian Century; "James Bond: Modern-day Dragon-
slayer/* and the article into this book.

In a way the structure of the book follows a pattern created by
the questions which the Bond phenomenon raised and the sub-
sequent answers revealed by research. It alternates from synthe-
sis to analysis and back to synthesis again: first by seeing the
Bond series as a whole in relation to the imagery of St. George
and the dragon; then by breaking down this imagery into its vari-
ous aspects within the context of what I have termed our "syn-
copated society" in the image of the secret agent and in the tre-
mendous problem of apathy seen from both sociological and
theological perspectives; and finally by bringing these elements
back together in a historical context, moving from fiction into fact
in the real-life figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Since this book is more like a honeycomb than a spider's web,
I have tried to acknowledge whenever possible those scholars
and writers whose research in depth have contributed the "honey"
to this cross-disciplinary study.

My special appreciation goes to those faculty members at Drew
University in Madison, New Jersey, whose support has been a
continual source of encouragement: Professors Nelle Morton, John
Godsey, Robert Friedrichs, and James Ranck. All responsibility for
my somewhat novel hypotheses must rest upon my own shoulders,
however. In addition, I should like to thank staff members of
libraries at Drew and Summit, New Jersey, as well as many local
bookdealers, for their assistance in helping me locate reference
materials. I should also mention the fact that the critical support
which Kingsley Amis gave to Ian Fleming in his James Bond
Dossier has served to reinforce my own opinions.

Finally, I would like to comment that it seems to me that men
must be able to write more books than women because they have
both secretaries and wives. In my case, since I had neither, my
particular appreciation must go to Ruth Jenkins for her unfailing
assistance in our household; to my husband, for his willingness to

Preface 11

share his escape reading material with me and for his forbearance
above and beyond the call of duty; and to our children, who have
learned to cope with an unusual sibling rival "mother's book!"

Ann S. Boyd
Summit, New Jersey

CONTENTS

Preface 9

001 Introduction: "Slug It Apathy!" 17

002 "Things Are Not What They Seem" 25

003 Doctor No Revisited 37

004 The Hot Image in the Cold World 51

005 The Devil with James Bond! 73

006 "Where's the Action?" 89

007 From Bond to Bonhoeffer 101
Notes 119

THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

OO 1 Introduction:
"Slug It Apathy"

MATTHEW 24:12

"And because anomia shall abound, the love

of many shall wax cold." (K.J.V.)
"As lawlessness spreads, men's love for

one another will grow cold." (N.E.B.)

It was three-twenty in the morning, a cold March morning, as
a small red Fiat turned off a dark, quiet suburban street into a
railroad parking lot.

Its driver, a slight dark-haired woman of twenty-eight, was
tired after her evening's work as manager of a bar. As she wea-
rily got out of her car and started toward the back entrance which
would lead to the safety of her second-floor apartment in the ad-
jacent building, the movements of a man on the far side of the
parking lot caught her eye.

Immediately alert to the risk of possible danger and doubly
aware of the dark, empty street, she changed direction, heading
instead toward the front of the building and the police call box up
on the corner. Her heels clicked staccato-like up the slight in-
cline, faster and faster as she realized that the man actually was
following her.

The distance closed between them. She started to run, past the
drugstore, the cleaners, but her pursuer caught up with her under
the streetlight by a bookstore. A shrill scream pierced the heavy
winter silence of the night, "Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please
help me! Please help me!"

Windows flew open, a few heads appeared cautiously from

17

18 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

behind the drawn blinds and shades in the apartment building
across the street. A man hollered, "Let that girl alone!" The at-
tacker withdrew, fading into the darkness, heading toward a
white sedan down the street.

Disoriented by the attack, anxious to treat her wounds, per-
haps naively trusting that in some way the observers watching
from across the street somehow would be able to guarantee her
safe journey home, the girl headed back down the street, around
the corner of the drugstore next to the parking lot.

But the assailant had only faked his retreat, circling around
instead in the darkness, perhaps hiding between the cars. Sud-
denly he pounced out at her, stabbing her again and again. Her
screams rang out a second time, "I'm dying! I'm dying!"

This time windows flew open in the apartment house on the
other side of the parking lot. Horrified observers were able to
see the man actually run off to the white sedan and drive away.
The girl continued, slowly, haltingly on around the building. She
was able to crawl past the first door, but then realized that she
could not possibly reach the safety of her own doorway farther
down the block. Somehow she managed to open the second door,
only to collapse at the bottom of the stairs. No one had come to
her assistance.

But the attacker was able to track her down again. This time
his assault was instantly fatal. Catherine Genovese was dead.

The police who arrived minutes later were too late to help.
They could only begin to assemble the astounding story of what
had happened. One man, the one neighbor who had finally called
the police, admitted that his delay had been the result of his not
wanting to get involved.

One by one the New York police were able to count up thirty-
eight witnesses who had seen and known what was happening,
yet had done nothing ordinary citizens who had awakened,
looked out their windows, and then, not wanting to get involved,
had gone back to sleep. One had yelled out of his window; one had
finally called the police, but not until after the girl had died.

No one had gone to her immediate assistance, yet in the weeks
following her murder, the reports of the Catherine Genovese

Introduction: "Slug It Apathy!" 19

case attracted city-wide and then national attention. Soon the re-
ports of the brutal murder and the search for the assailant were
actually bypassed in the astonishment over the inaction of the
witnesses. In a moment of dreadful clarity, one woman's hor-
rified response spoke for all, "Dear God, what have we come to!"

The next reaction was a search for some explanation. Various
suggestions were made and various targets were hit, such as the
inadequacy of the police force and the lack of a special emergency
call number. But although fear of involvement had been the first
rationalization, it remained for the newspaper editor, A. M. Rosen-
thai, to diagnose the illness as more severe: "For in that instant
of shock, the mirror showed quite clearly what was wrong, that
the face of mankind was spotted with the disease of apathy all
mankind. But this was too frightening a thought to live with and
soon the beholders began to set boundaries for the illness, to
search frantically for causes that were external and to look for the
carrier." 1

Psychologists, sociologists, theologians, and psychiatrists could
add little except qualifying terms for the syndrome. The Geno-
vese case immediately became the focal point for a continuing
series of news items, soon stereotyped and blunted by their rep-
etition under the editors' designation, "Slug it apathy!" As soon
as what had happened could be pigeonholed, it became easier to
ignore, and the original shock faded into the general pattern of
concern over the state of contemporary society.

For while theologians ponder their "hermeneuticaT tasks and
ministers prepare "honest-to-God" sermons, the "world come of
age" often appears to the average layman quite like an obscure
package wrapped in brown paper, sitting on his mail table and
ticking. Will it blow up in his face at the least provocation like a
time bomb regardless of how he might try to prevent it? Or, if he
leaves it alone, will it just run down like a clock without winding,
"not with a bang, but a whimper"?

The old, sentimental image of the traditional "little brown
church in the dell" as spiritual hub of a cohesive community has
been shattered by changing political, economic, and sociological
conditions, but a new image of the mission and responsibility of

20 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

the church in an age of ambiguity has not yet been formed.

Social historians may some day be able to decide if the syn-
copated society in which we live may be more aptly designated the
"twisted age'* because of the strange contorted dances of the
younger generation, or the "wistful" age, because, as Ernest
Becker observed, "Never before had so many seen man's short-
comings so clearly and been able to do so little about them." We
have left the stage of a primitive savage society in which men
existed as little better than other animals, only to reach a more
tragic dimension in which a man's market value depends upon the
value of the machine which could replace him.

Because it suggests elision and the offbeat, the term "synco-
pation" provides an excellent descriptive term for the society in
which we participate. First of all, as Webster's dictionary indicates,
in music "syncopation" is the "temporary displacing or shifting of
the regular metrical accent." In grammar the "syncope" is the
"loss or elision of one or more sounds from the middle of a word
(as in ne'er for never)." But, secondly, and much more sug-
gestively, in medicine the "syncope," which comes from a Greek
word meaning "a cutting up," means a "swoon due to cerebral
anemia." Appropriately our times have been termed "out of
joinf ' and our apathy is the long swoon from which we need re-
viving.

Although in music syncopation is very enjoyable, in a society
syncopation can have disastrous results. Socially we observe syn-
copation whenever institutions persist long after their ability to
function as required, when new institutions do not appear in
time to meet the demands of new situations, and when individuals
are left to grapple with such situations without cultural support.
Today myriads of objective analyses document the extent of
man's inability to cope with a society which has developed
faster than its powers to handle all of its needs. Other projective
studies suggest that the problems we have now are simple com-
pared to the new ethical and moral questions which are about to be
raised by forthcoming medical and technical discoveries. The
results of this syncopation are manifested directly in the many
portrayals of men and women in various states of "eclipse" by

Introduction: "Slug It Apathy!' 9 21

dope, alcohol, mental and emotional illnesses, criminal and civil
disobedience.

This elision has been described in split-level dimensions by
philosophers and social scientists as well as by the creative artists:
first of all, as the loss of the self, delineated in such books as
Viktor FrankTs Man's Search for Meaning, Allen Wheelis' The
Quest for Identity, and Helen Merrell Lynd's On Shame and
the Search for Identity; second, the loss of community, as de-
scribed by Maurice Stein in his Eclipse of Community; and third,
the loss of the transcendent, which has been presented not only
by Martin Buber in his Eclipse of God, but also by the young
theologians who are currently proclaiming the "death of God."

It has remained, however, for the artist and the poet to ex-
press this sense of loss most poignantly and personally. The move-
ment in art over the last century from realism through impres-
sionism into symbolism and surrealism presents the visual
analogue for William Butler Yeats's lines:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 2

The emptiness, sterility, misery, and solitude of modern man
lost in a strange world of the machine and the atom has been
captured directly in Giacometti's "sculpture of despair" and such
faces as those in paintings by George Tooker ("The Subway")
or Edvard Munch ("The Cry"). Surrealism illustrates the ques-
tioning of values in an age of ambiguity, and even the pop art of
the day echoes W. H. Auden's line: "God will cheat no one, not
even the world of its triumph." 3

The most outstanding single characteristic of our present syn-
copated society, however, is that it has become confused about,
and even lost, its "beat," for it exists under the perilous dichot-
omy of dualistic thinking, a state which John MacMurray terms
the "desire to know the truth without having to live by the truth."
A parallel description of this characteristic as it affects a specific

22 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

situation has been provided by the Pulitzer prize-winning journal-
ist, Harrison Salisbury, in his book, The Shook-Up Generation:
"We have gangs not because we do not know how to prevent
them, but because we do not have enough interest or energy to
do the things we already know will bring an end to delinquency.
We do not lack knowledge. We lack the will." 4

Part of this confusion about the "beat," however, is that even
when our intentions have been the very finest, the results have
brought about unforeseen disaster. It is a devastating experience
to realize that we have actually increased human misery, suffer-
ing, and hunger by giving to the needy, healing the sick, and
feeding the hungry as we face the population explosion now taking
place around the world. Perhaps one of the best capsule de-
scriptions of man in the twentieth century has been provided by
psychologist Erik Erikson, who wrote:

Artful perverter of joy and keen exploiter of strength, man
is the animal that has learned to survive "in a fashion," to
multiply without food for the multitudes, to grow up health-
ily without reaching personal maturity, to live well but with-
out purpose, to invent ingeniously without aim, and to kill
grandiosely without need. 5

Just like the fanner confronting the state agricultural expert
who had invited him to a workshop on advanced farming tech-
niques, we might also admit that we are not now "farming" as
well as we already know how to "farm." And the tragic partner to
this realization is that all too often we just do not care enough to
try. With Ecclesiastes too often we might say, "All things are full
of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with
seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." Neither church nor so-
ciety has yet been able to cope with the discontinuities of change,
the elision of human values, and the consequences of transition
from poverty to affluence, from daily toil to automation, from
ignorance to technical competence, from fear of the future to hope
for the present. It is easier for astronauts to meet each other's
space capsules 180 miles above the earth traveling at 17,500
miles per hour than it is for presidents of cold-war nations to

Introduction: "Slug It Apathy!" 23

meet each other around a peace table. We are beset daily by a
variety of small demons; the demonic lurks behind every head-
line.

But suddenly out of the swirling gray mists of contemporary
ambiguity regarding the nature and worth of mankind, a mysteri-
ous figure has appeared. Is he a modern Perseus armed by the
gods in order to slay Medusa? St. George on a white horse on his
way to kill a dragon? Don Quixote in search of windmills? Chris-
tian of Pilgrim's Progress traveling through the Slough of Despond
or imprisoned in the castle of Giant Despair?

No, none of these exactly, but a figure uniquely appropriate to
the modern idiom: Commander James Bond, the incredible Brit-
ish undercover agent 007, created by the imagination of the late
novelist Ian Fleming, whose phenomenal popularity brings a host
of questions to the surface:

Does James Bond have any more or any less theological sig-
nificance than the comic strip Peanuts!

Why are his fantastic exploits attracting record-setting motion
picture audiences as well as millions of people around the world
who read of them in more than eighteen different languages?

What accounts for the astonishing variety of critical comments,
both among the earlier critics and among those presently seeking
more esoteric reasons for the series' popularity?

Although it has been reported publicly that Fleming himself
regarded his work as mere "piffle" and that he "deliberately in-
tended it to be exciting, successful, lucrative and, as he scorn-
fully remarked, not in the least 'literary, 1 " e can we find perhaps
in the Bond series a twentieth-century layman's deliberate analy-
sis of the relationship between the "demonic" and individual re-
sponsibility?

Might we suspect that James Bond speaks to us as significantly
as his analogues (Perseus, St. George, Don Quixote, Christian)
spoke to their contemporaries centuries ago?

Just what is the Bond phenomenon anyway?

To answer these questions we shall have to follow a few wan-
dering trails, even scurrying out into the bushes occasionally to

24 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

snag a few pertinent points from various disciplines, ranging from
literature, through psychology and sociology, even into theology
and art. But with Bond for a guide, even the bushes might prove
inviting!

OO2 "Things Are Not
What They Seem"

"You see the ways the fisherman doth take
To catch the fish, what engines doth he make?
Behold! how he engageth all his wits,
Also his snares, lines, angles, hooks and nets.
Yet fish there be that neither hook nor line
Nor snare nor net nor engine can make thine;
They must be groped for and be tickled, too,
Or they will not be catch'd whate're you do."
"The Author's Apology for His Book"
John Bunyan

Would you believe me if I said that James Bond is one of the
most famous mythological heroes of all time?

No? Well, would you believe James Bond is one of the seven
greatest legendary champions of Christendom?

NO? Well, would you believe James Bond is the greatest secret
agent in the world of fiction?

Maybe? Well, then perhaps you'll settle for the James Bond
adventures being a lot of fun and great escape reading material?

You would? Good. At least we can begin together somewhere!

You see, the difficulty in all this business of trying to discuss the
Bond phenomenon is that it's very hard to take the whole affair
very seriously, especially when Fleming never would himself. So,
we have to start out on the surface of things, and wait to see what
develops.

A note of warning to the reader before we begin, however:

25

26 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Don't try to read any of the Bond adventures seriously! To read
Bond as a scholastic exercise surely would smack of what's been
termed "comic incommensurability." Bond was meant for fun,
for escape, and legitimately requires the "willing suspension of
disbelief"! Just like the fairy tale of the princess and the pea, real
literary critics can't sleep very well when they try to read Flem-
ing just like they'd read James Joyce. If Fleming was interested
in what Kierkegaard termed "indirect communication," the least
we can do is to read him the way he intended! The only real
value in rereading Fleming is to discover that there is more to his
series of thriller adventures than one originally might suspect.
The more one reads him, the more one may appreciate his work
and regret the distortion which the "Bondomania" of the movies
has produced.

Regardless of what anyone says now and whatever significance
people might consider the Bond phenomenon to have a century
from now, there can be little doubt concerning the impact it made
when it struck the cultural mainland with full-fledged hurricane
force in the 1960's. The ubiquitous symbol of secret agent 007
was found everywhere from bread and bubblegum to men's
fashions and toiletries, from parlor games to children's dolls and
paper dolls, from his own image to that of imitations in books,
films, and television series. More than two hundred commercial
products were authorized to cany the official trademark, while
hundreds of others hitched onto the Bond-wagon surreptitiously.
The James Bond syndrome was soon a universal focal-point for
countless Walter Mittys. As Kingsley Amis said, "We don't want
to have Bond to dinner, or go golfing with Bond, or talk to Bond.
We want to be Bond!"

The results of this gold rush were a million times more lucra-
tive for its investors than California gold-seekers ever could have
dreamed. "Million" soon became a commonplace adjective any-
where the Bond-touch was felt: Ian Fleming himself became a
millionaire before his death in 1964; actor Sean Conneiy, who
really was Bond for the movie audiences, was soon able to com-
mand a million dollars per film himself. By the spring of 1966 the
sales of the books had reached forty-five million copies, with

"Things Are Not What They Seem" 27

more than one hundred million movie tickets having been sold.

The hordes of critics soon appeared. Before the last Fleming
novel, two full-length books analyzing the secret agent's activities
were published, and three more about Bond and Fleming fol-
lowed within a year. 1 Book reviewers and commentators were
running right along with the pack. Their opinions ranged from
those who viewed Bond primarily as an all-powerful hero figure
a la Jung (Claude Mauriac), a bungler (Russell Baker), or a dull
uninteresting man in himself, a simple pro forma (Amis), to
those who attributed his audience appeal to voyeurism (Jacques
Barzun), to the Freudian "latency period" (Cyril Connolly),
to a longing for the defeat of modern gadgetry, viz., the Bomb
(Mauriac again), or even more remarkably to Goldwater's
conservative mystique (the New Guard, published by the Young
Americans for Freedom). 2 As a critic, Anthony Boucher continued
to maintain that he had never been able to understand the appeal
of the Fleming books, and writers Margery Allingham and John
Le Carre concurred in their disapproval. Intuitively they recog-
nized that in some peculiar way tie books of Bond do not quite
properly belong in their field.

In the meantime, back on the newsstands and the box office,
the general public continued to demonstrate its approval financi-
ally. Could it be that the James Bond phenomenon had become
simply a case of the "emperor's new clothes"? Was it just another
symptom of the playboy mentality of the pepsi generation? If so,
P. T. Barnum's injunction continues in force; if not, the phenom-
enon deserves more serious consideration.

Given the "hula-hoop" type of evidence already demonstrated,
it might seem preposterous to suggest that the James Bond phe-
nomenon has any deep literary, sociological, or theological value.
But, with the deliberate intention of being a little preposterous
and of trying to provoke discussion, I shall continue my hypothesis
that whereas Peanuts (whose relevance has been championed by
Robert L. Short) 3 is speaking to the "children" in a "world come
of age," the series of Bond novels is directly relevant to "adoles-
cents" searching for values and for a hero figure, one who would
defend justice and humanity. And, despite the distortions of

28 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Fleming's original materials in the films, their immediate appeal
as "highly sophisticated comic strips for adults" has revealed that
the Fleming formula was applicable to the general public as well
as the original reading market.

This hypothesis rests on the contention that the James Bond
phenomenon has contained a literary time bomb which could not
have been detected until the entire series was completed and all
the data compiled. The insight which the German satirist Kurt
Tucholsky enjoined upon his readers and which Peter Berger
echoes is applicable here: "Things are not what they seem. They
are different. Quite, quite different." In later chapters we shall
attempt to discover just why the entire Western world seems
caught on Bond-fire, but here we begin with the material itself.

Perhaps the best criterion for understanding the Bond phe-
nomenon from a literary standpoint, morally and technically, was
provided by Edgar Allan Poe in the words he supplied his de-
tective Dupin in "The Purloined Letter":

There is a game of puzzles . . . which is played upon a map.
One party playing requires another to find a given word
the name of town, river, state, or empire any word, in
short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart.
A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his op-
ponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but
the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters,
from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-
largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observa-
tion by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical
oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehen-
sion by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those
considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably
self-evident. 4

In a similar manner, by stretching his intentions over a series
of thirteen novels following the pattern of the thriller genre, Flem-
ing has been able to utilize a variety of literary and theological
insights without detection. The casual reader of one or two books
in the series is exposed to only a fraction of the total content.
However, a careful analysis of the completed work reveals it as
the saga of a modern knight of faith whose adventures involve a

"Things Are Not What They Seem" 29

gallery of modem demons which have been attacking contemporary
mankind just as diabolically as Medusa and all the other legendary
demons and dragons attacked mankind in ages past. Rather than
casting pearls before swine, Fleming's genius has cast swine as the
personifications of the devil before a hero who is willing to
sacrifice all for the great pearl of life and faith.

Individually the Bond adventures parody the form of the de-
tective thrillers: secret agent 007 proceeds to seek out and de-
stroy various adversaries, each of which surpasses its predeces-
sor in the manner of diabolic test or ordeal he presents for Bond
to endure. The basic modus operandi of each novel is the same:

(1) O07's call to duty by "M," head of the secret service bureau;

(2) his voluntary acceptance of the mission; (3) a period of
reconnaissance and preparation which culminates in O07's per-
sonal involvement and commitment to the task; (4) the en-
counter with the adversary, with the nature of the particular evil
he represents spelled out clearly, followed by the ordeal in which
only his sheer will to live and his physical endurance carry him
through the test; and (5) the complete destruction (usually) of
the adversary, even though 007 may have to be rescued by a
compatriot before his "safe" return. The pattern bears close anal-
ogy to the adventures of the mythological hero which Joseph
Campbell discusses definitively in The Hero with a Thousand
Faces. The processes are identical but the metaphors have been
changed a .25 Beretta instead of a sword, a flamethrowing
marsh buggy instead of a real live dragon.

Although each of the novels can stand on its own relative
merits within the "thriller" genre, collectively the series is more
than the sum of its parts. In totality it serves to provide the book
which Bond had wished for in Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale,
in a chapter entitled "The Nature of Evil":

There's a Good Book about goodness and how to be good
and so forth, but there's no Evil Book about evil and how to
be bad. The Devil had no prophets to write his Ten Com-
mandments, and no team of authors to write his biography.
His case has gone completely by default. We know nothing
about him but a lot of fairy stories from our parents and
schoolmasters. He has no book from which we can learn the

30 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

nature of evil in all its forms, with parables about evil people,
proverbs about evil people, folklore about evil people. (CR,
P- H) 5

At this early point in his career as a secret service agent, Bond
is ready to resign. In fact, he actually has reached the point of
considering the whole business of spying as utterly futile, a view-
point which has been the major premise also in John Le Carre's
two best-selling spy novels, The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold and The Looking Glass War. But whereas Le Carre has
expanded and deepened this perspective most effectively, Flem-
ing sums it up in the phrase "playing Red Indians" and sends
Bond off on a different tack. The takeoff point is delineated
clearly in this one chapter in the conversation between Bond and
his French counterpart, Mathis, as well as in the other books
when Fleming discusses how rapidly national enemies become
friends over the course of history.

In this talk, which takes place after Bond has nearly recovered
from the torture he suffered under the sadistic hands of the
SMERSH agent Le Chiffre, Bond points out to Mathis that when we
are young, it is very easy to distinguish between right and wrong,
but that as we grow older the process becomes more difficult. He
says that at school "if s easy to pick out one's own villains and
heroes, and one grows up wanting to be a hero and kill the vil-
lains."

However, out in the field, after killing two villains and be-
coming a Double O number in the Service, he begins to see that
the villains and heroes get all mixed up. Even though patriotism
can make the process seem all right in the beginning., "this coun-
try-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out of date." He
points out that, although today we are fighting communism, the
brand of conservatism which Britain has today would have been
called communism by those who lived fifty years ago, and that
he would have been told to go and fight that. "History is moving
pretty quickly these days, and the heroes and villains keep on
changing parts."

It is only in encountering Le Chiffre (Fleming's fictional ver-
sion of a French Communist and paymaster of the Soviet murder

"Things Are Not What They Seem' 9 3 1

organization SMERSH) that Bond began to see that this evil man
had really served a "wonderful" purpose:

... a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest pur-
pose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have
helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by
which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness
could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of
him, to see and estimate his wickedness, and we emerge
from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men.
(Ibid.)

After a satiric interchange, Mathis agrees with Bond's premise
about evil but refuses to accept his resignation:

. . . now that you have seen a really evil man you will know
how evil they can be, and you will go after them to destroy
them in order to protect yourself and the people you love.
You won't wait or argue about it. You know what they look
like now and what they can do to people. You may be a bit
more choosy about the jobs you take on. You may want to
be certain that the target really is black; but there are
plenty of really black targets around. There's still plenty for
you to do. ... Surround yourself with human beings, my
dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles. . . .
But don't let me down and become human yourself. We
would lose such a wonderful machine, (pp. 112-113)

Although Mathis* speech helps to instigate Bond's pursuit of
various forms of evil in the subsequent adventures, his final
warning is disregarded. Before the end of the first novel Bond is
already well on the way in a "humanization" process. Initially, we
read, he has never been made to suffer "by cards or by women,"
knowing that when that happened he too would be branded
with the "deadly question-mark" which he had recognized so
often in others, "the promise to pay before you have lost; the ac-
ceptance of fallibility." In Casino Royale both cards and a woman
go wrong for him: by the eleventh chapter ("The Moment of
Truth") he had been beaten and cleaned out at cards, and it is
only because of Felix Leiter's contribution that he is able to con-
tinue and win all of Le Chiffre's money; and at the end of the book
the integrity of his love for Vesper Lynd disintegrates with her

32 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

suicide and the realization that she had been a double agent.

The losses which Bond suffers in this book at cards, in love,
and by physical torture (a diabolical "spanking") set the pat-
tern for each of the following books, in which he gradually be-
comes less machine-like and more human, until finally he is the
bumbling operative whom the critics josh and suggest should be
renumbered "006 Vi ." At the conclusion of Casino Roy ale Bond
realizes that in his previous career he has merely been playing at
the child's game of Red Indians, and so he resolves to leave the
business of espionage to the "white-collar boys" who can "spy
and catch the spies," while he himself will "go after the threat
behind the spies, the threat that made them spy."

In the pursuit of Bond's pledge Fleming leads the readers of
his subsequent adventures down a Mobius-strip primrose path
into a surrealistic world in which things are seldom what they seem
to be. Evidences of this verbal surrealism are to be found in
Fleming's hyper-attention to minuscule details, his disregard for
really probable plots, the poetic "fancies" of the names he gives
his characters, and the description of surrealistic scenes in which
he comments upon the strange unreality of a particular situation.
These verbal characteristics are directly analogous to the visual
images which have been presented by such artists as Salvador
Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, and Peter Blume who took part
in the surrealist movement following World War I with a radical
questioning of man's rational abilities and value systems.

Although other critics have complained about his plots and
compiled lists of what Amis termed the "Fleming effect," the
Fleming mystique about names has been relatively ignored. His
friends may have shuddered to find their names casually dropped
onto a character just for the fun of it; besides friends (Leiter)
and associates (Harling), Fleming even christened one of the in-
nocent country girls in On Her Majesty's Secret Service with an
abbreviated version of his wife's name (Anne Charters). It is not
unusual to find the phonetic spelling of a name, rather than its
customary usage, e.g., Mr. and Mrs. Phancey in The Spy Who
Loved Me and even Sean Connery's first name in another very
intriguing passage.

"Things Are Not What They Seem" 33

The most fun comes, however, when one tallies up the list of
characters in an entire novel; in Diamonds Are Forever the vil-
lains are American members of a "Spangled Mob," the heroine is
Tiffany Case, the jockeys are "Tingaling" Bell and Tommy T.
Lucky, the various thugs are "Lame-Brain" Pissaro, "Rosy" Budd,
"Boofy" Kidd, and "Windy" Wint, all of whom are led by "Shady"
Tree. A tally of the entire list of characters soon leads one to
believe that Fleming was having a grand time of spoofing some-
one with them, all in contradiction to the dictate that a "rose is a
rose is a rose."

The uncanny aspects of many geographical scenes in the
novels directly resemble the surrealist school of painting, e.g.,
Fleming's description of the rocket-launch site in Moonraker;

It looked like a newly laid aerodrome or rather, he thought,
with its three disparate concrete "things", the beehive dome,
the flat-iron blast-wall, and the distant cube of the firing
point, each casting black pools of shadow towards him in the
early sun, like a Dali desert landscape on which three ob-
jets trouves reposed at carefully calculated random. (M,
p. 89)

Fleming reserves his primary surrealistic effect, however, for
secret agent O07's encounters with the grotesque caricatures who
serve as the various personifications of evil in the twentieth-
century world. We shall take a closer look at each of them in a
later chapter, as each of them is a representation of a villain whose
appearance is "larger than life." The description of Doctor No
contains the most explicit surrealistic reference:

It was impossible to tell Doctor No's age: as far as Bond
could see, there were no lines on the face. It was odd to see
a forehead as smooth as the top of the polished skull. Even
the cavernous indrawn cheeks below the prominent cheek-
bones looked as smooth as fine ivory. There was something
Dali-esque about the eyebrows, which were fine and black
and sharply upswept as if they had been painted on as
make-up for a conjurer. . . . The bizarre, gliding figure
looked like a giant venomous worm wrapped in grey tin-
foil, and Bond would not have been surprised to see the rest
of it trailing slimily along the carpet behind. (DN, p. 130)

If Fleming had pitted his secret agent 007 only against the

34 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

realistic enemies in the "normal" spy routine, one would not have
been able to perceive so clearly his basic intention. In Goldfinger,
however, he provides his own clue: "Goldfinger said, 'Mr. Bond,
they have a saying in Chicago: "Once is happenstance, twice is
coincidence, the third time it's enemy action/"" To continue
the metaphor, by the time Bond has tilted with his fourth adver-
sary we may be sure that the series is concerned with armed war-
fare against Satan's contemporary minions.

Fortunately our hypothesis does not have to rest upon the evi-
dence presented in this surrealistic questioning of values in the
Bond series alone. For in instigating the original idea for, and
publication of, The Seven Deadly Sins, Fleming provided left-
handed direct evidence for what his right hand had been doing in-
directly all along. In this collection of essays by seven distinguished
authors on the seven ancient deadly sins (Envy, Pride, Covetous-
ness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust, Anger), Fleming admits his own
"dreadful conclusion that in fact all these ancient sins, compared
with the sins of today, are in fact very close to virtues." He sees how
each of them could be used strategically to combat greater evils
"as for Anger surely we all need more rather than less of it to com-
bat the indifference, the Tm all right, Jack' attitudes, of today." And
he suggests that all of those seven ancient virtues likewise possess
their own demonic counterpoints today.

The archdemon of Fleming's original roster of sins is the spirit
of accidie (or accidia or acedia), which may be translated as in-
difference, carelessness, or apathy. Bond encounters this spirit
not only in the caricatures of "Mr. Big" in Live and Let Die,
Doctor No, and "Blofeld" alias "Shatterhand," but also in himself
as well. As Fleming puts it: "Of all the seven, only Sloth in its
extreme form of accidia, which is a form of spiritual suicide and a
refusal of joy ... has my wholehearted condemnation, perhaps
because in moments of despair I have seen its face." 6

In addition, even though he recognizes that the great authors
could not have written their masterpieces without the depiction of
the seven sins and their consequences, Fleming suggests a list of
"seven deadlier sins": Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy,
Self-Righteousness, Moral Cowardice, and Malice. In doing so

"Things Are Not What They Seem" 35

he points to his own hypothesis: "If I were to put these modern
seven into the scales against the ancient seven I cannot but feel
that the weight of the former would bring the brass tray crashing
down." More startling yet, he concludes: "As a man in the street,
I can only express my belief that being possessed of the ancient
seven deadly sins one can still go to heaven, whereas to be afflicted
by the modern variations can only be a passport to hell."

In an interview with a New Yorker reporter a year before his
death, Fleming accounted for Bond's amazing popularity:

I think the reason for his success is that people are lacking
in heroes in real life today. Heroes are always getting
knocked Philip and Mountbatten are examples of this . . .
Well, I don't regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at
least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny
way, and in the end, after giant despair, he wins the girl or
the jackpot or whatever it may be. My books have no social
significance, except a deleterious one; they're considered to
have too much violence and too much sex. But all history
has that. 7

It is here that our hypothesis can continue to suggest that
perhaps Fleming's tacit intent in writing the Bond series was to
name and to destroy the modern gods of our society which are
actually the expressions of the demonic in contemporary disguise.

While visiting a battlefront during World War n as part of his
duty as a commander in the British Naval Intelligence directing
the activities of his own Red Indian group, the Number 30 As-
sault Unit, Fleming announced to a friend that after the war he
intended to write the "spy-story to end all spy-stories." In many
respects he has fulfilled his prophecy, despite the friend's almost
choking on his Spam at the time. Critics have viewed the Bond
adventures from various angles: yet one clue which they have
overlooked is Fleming's own suggestion that we have been looking
for sin in the wrong places, that we must go "after the threat be-
hind the spies, the threat that made them spy" and the source be-
hind the obvious source not automation or the bomb but man's
inhumanity and apathy regarding his fellowman. By adopting the
thriller genre despite all its "sex, sadism and snobbery" bait

36 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

for public appeal Fleming has been able to give self-awareness
a "sting from behind."

But his cleverness was not restricted to only this sleight-of-
hand operation, for by examining the most notorious of the ad-
ventures, we can turn the screw one more notch and see the next
trick he brought into play against, as well as for, the reader.

OO3 Doctor No Revisited

Quarrel:

"People dem want different tings in dis world.

An what dem want sufficient dem gits." (DN, p. 38)

The great critical hoopla about all of the Bond books began to
snowball after the publication of Doctor No, the sixth book in the
series. Although the first five adventures had met with only rou-
tine responses from newspaper and magazine critics either at-
tracted or repelled according to personal tastes, Doctor No pro-
voked explosive reactions when it was published in 1958. If one
counts the actual number of words in reviews listed in the Book
Review Digest, it is apparent that this was the most notorious of
all the books and it seems quite appropriate that it was made into
the first movie. Actually Fleming had invited special considera-
tion for Doctor No, because it presented the return of James
Bond after his apparent death in the conclusion of From Russia
with Love, a death which early fans in England had rebelled
against just as vociferously as Sherlock Holmes devotees once
regretted that detective's temporary disappearance.

However, even though the fans were happy to have Bond
back, the critics began their great divide either they loved
the books quite irrationally or they hated them just as passion-
ately. A few reviewers were frankly appreciative, e.g., James
Sandoe, who termed it the "astutest of elegant leg-pulls ... the
most artfully bold, dizzyingly poised thriller of a decade," and
L. G. Offord, who similarly considered it "hair-raising," but also
"so wildly funny that it might almost be a leg-pull." Saturday

37

38 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Review was content to call it "an erudite cliff-hanger with sex-
sauce," but Anthony Boucher, the true connoisseur of the spy-
detective genre, deplored it for being 80,000 words long with
plot only enough for 8000 words and originality for 800! Frankly
I would reverse his numbers, saying that Fleming had begun
with one of the most ancient and familiar of plots consisting of
eight words which his originality spun off into 80,000 words in
Doctor No with various themes and variations extending out into
all of the other long and short versions!

Although Robert Hatch had disdained Doctor No as a "con-
centrated example of published nastiness!" the most virulent
counterattack was mounted by Paul Johnson in the British pub-
lication, the New Statesman, under a title which has been mis-
quoted without credit ever since: "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism."
Johnson termed it the "nastiest book ever written" and one which
he was able to continue reading only because he realized that
"here was a social phenomenon of some significance." In his
opinion there were only:

three basic ingredients in Doctor No, all unhealthy, all thor-
oughly English: the sadism of a schoolboy bully, the me-
chanical, two-dimensional sex longings of a frustrated ado-
lescent, and the crude, snob-cravings of a suburban adult
Mr. Fleming has no literary skill, the construction of the
book is chaotic, and entire incidents and situations are in-
serted, and then forgotten, in a haphazard manner. But the
three ingredients are manufactured and blended with de-
liberate professional precision: Mr. Fleming dishes up his
recipe with all the calculated accountancy of a Lyons Corner
House. 1

Needless to say, such critical reaction was better for the sales
of the book in Britain than having a book banned in Boston
would be in the United States, and one could say that the Bond
phenomenon was launched with Doctor No. Of course, various
other factors which are extraneous to the books themselves have
been suggested, such as their great popularity with the British up-
per class, the appreciation of them in the United States by Presi-
dent Kennedy and Allen Dulles, as well as the frank appeal which
they have for adolescent males looking for a continuation of some

Doctor No Revisited 39

secret formula regarding cars, liquor, and women (the same ap-
peal which Playboy magazine has pyramided into a titanic en-
terprise).

It is doubtful that Fleming himself as a writer could have re-
sented the critics' malevolent attacks entirely, for apparently
these reviews only served to increase his readership on the one
hand; and on the other such reaction was proof that his bait had
been taken by the fish. However, the misleading emphasis upon
"sex, snobbery and sadism" and the false impression of the Bond
"style of life" meant that Fleming was forced to counteract the
emphasis which was being placed upon the wrong syllable, i.e.,
upon James Bond whom Fleming had designed originally just as
the blunt instrument to perform as the agent in his hidden drama
about evil. His attempts to restore a balance with his own perspec-
tive appear directly in several adventures. Although The Spy
Who Loved Me is written in the style of a true-confession type of
novelette on a soap-opera level, it presents a devastating parody of
the misuse and manipulation of sex. Snobbery is the Achilles'
heel which almost defeats Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret
Service, and accordingly presents Fleming with many opportuni-
ties to mock those overly concerned about family lineage and
coats of arms (cf. SS, p. 86).

One must try to appreciate the particular problem Fleming
faced in his chosen genre as he attempted to convince his readers
that all human life is of value. As a person Fleming himself was a
man who could not even bear to have the rats killed at his Ja-
maican home to Sir Anthony Eden's discomfiture and hence
rapid extermination of the same when he had rented the property.
The villains whom Bond was "licensed to kill" were all deliber-
ately described as "larger than life," but still this distinction is
difficult to maintain, especially if the reader is not to suspect his
ulterior motives. Consequently Fleming was having to repeat con-
stantly that Bond could never kill in cold blood, but only in situ-
ations in which he faced being killed himself (or had been brain-
washed by an adversary) .

The beginning of Goldfinger, which followed Doctor No, pre-
sents one of Fleming's strongest attempts to re-establish his own

40 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

values: "James Bond, with two double bourbons inside him, sat
in the final departure lounge of Miami Airport and thought about
life and death." He had just been forced to kill an "evil man"
on one of his minor assignments, but he meditates:

What an extraordinary difference there was between a body
full of person and a body that was empty! Now there is
someone, now there is no more. This had been a Mexican
with a name and an address, an employment card and per-
haps a driving licence. Then something had gone out of him,
out of the envelope of flesh and cheap clothes, and had left
him an empty paper bag waiting for the dust-cart. And the
difference, the thing that had gone out of the stinking Mexi-
can bandit, was greater than all Mexico, (pp. 7-8)

It is hard to decide just exactly what metaphor to use when
describing Fleming's literary strategy. We could say that he con-
cocted a verbal monkey trap so that his readers were compelled
to get more than they reached for originally. Or we might say
that he took an old, old recipe for serving a mass audience, spiced
it up a bit, and then repackaged it in a new container. As I've
suggested in the preceding chapter, there's nothing secret about
what he was doing everything he had to do and say was out in
plain sight, just as in Poe's case of the purloined letter.

The situation seems quite akin to that of S0ren Kierkegaard,
who also wrote material for both direct and indirect communica-
tion, but on a much deeper level. It has been said that the one
thing which that great Dane feared most of all was that his work
might fall into the hands of the professors. From Fleming's own
comments one may be quite certain that the last thing which he
wanted also was for his ouvre to fall prematurely into the hands
of either literary or social critics. It seems that he consciously
downgraded his work so that whatever didactic element it does
contain might remain unstated, and, therefore, by being well-
dramatized, be able to insinuate itself through art (as in the plays
by Ibsen and Shaw). By maintaining his own "cover" as the
mercenary author of thrillers designed merely to attract the mass
public, Fleming could be sure that the attention of his audience
would not be deflected from the narrative action to the more

Doctor No Revisited 41

serious matters which he was insinuating subliminafly in the back-
ground.

The catch in this whole process is that people have been con-
tent to take Fleming's statements at face value, as he had kept
insisting that they should, and they believe that his chief goal
was limited to what he had said to get adolescents of all ages to
turn the page. This is quite akin to the surrealist painter, Rene
Magritte, who painted a picture of a pipe and lettered under-
neath "This is not a pipe" or an image of a commonplace tuba
which announces it is not a tuba because it has burst into flames.
As John Canaday comments, "The constant implication in a paint-
ing by Magritte is that nothing unusual is going on, and that only
our own dull-wittedness in the experience of daily life has kept
us from seeing the nature of Magritte's fantastic world." 2 That
Fleming was aware of the same distortions our private perspec-
tives can produce is evident in one of Bond's reflections in the
last novel:

This was always happening in his particular trade. You were
looking in the dark for a beetle with red wings. Your eyes
were focused for that particular pattern on the bark of the
tree. You didn't notice the moth with the cryptic colouring
that crouched quietly nearby, itself like a piece of the bark,
itself just as important to the collector. The focus of your
eyes was too narrow. Your mind was too concentrated.
You were using 1 by 100 magnification, and your 1 by 10
was not in focus. (GG, p. 94)

Of course, as Kingsley Amis has said, if you want to be known
as a great writer, you don't go around calling your work piffle,
which Fleming cheerfully did. On the other hand, Fleming's own
reaction to Amis' comment would probably have been a huge
laugh and a quiet aside that one can't go around being a great bore
either, telling people how significant your works are going to be a
few years hence.

Our problem at this point consists of keeping the Bond series
within the 1 by 10 focus in order to see just what Fleming was up
to. In addition to the most obvious direct communication which
Fleming made in The Seven Deadly Sins as discussed above,
there are a variety of subtle indications which suggest that his

42 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

"game" was deliberately oblique. There is the magic car GEN-11
in his delightful children's book, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which
only the knowing can recognize as "genii." There is Fleming's
constant concern for Bond's cover as well as his search for the
"invisible pattern" and the "invisible man." There is also the
incongruity between his proud claim, on the one hand, to have
learned to write rapidly and accurately while he was a foreign
correspondent for Reuters, and, on the other hand, his obvious
goofs which he let ride in many books, e.g., Sing-Sing as a women's
prison, the wrong kind of brakes on the Orient Express, the mis-
takes in perfume and guns (all of which stimulated his readers to
look more closely at the "Fleming effect"). Tangentially, one
might also consider Fleming's own interest in collecting the world's
most pivotal books since the eighteenth century, his sponsorship of
the most erudite magazine in the world on book collecting, his
excellent collection of antique brasses of gods and goddesses, and
his reported penchant for rambling about London seeking out old
churches.

In addition, in a magazine interview Fleming admitted quite
candidly that he thought that his readers enjoyed and accepted
his little idiosyncracies and didn't stop to think about them. As he
said, "The pace of the narrative gets one by these nasty little
corners. It's a sleight of hand operation. It's overpowering the
reader. You take him along at such a rate, you interest him so
deeply in the narrative that he isn't jolted by these incongruities. I
suppose I do it to demonstrate that I can do it" 3

The whole process seems to be a sort of literary "Hidden Per-
suader" similar to the hypnotic one Fleming devised for the vil-
lain Blofeld (alias Bleuville) to use on the simple country girls in
On Her Majesty's Secret Service:

Deep hypnosis! That was what he had heard. The Hidden
Persuader! The repetitive, singsong message injected into
the brain while it was on the twilight edge of consciousness.
Now, in Ruby's subconscious, the message would work on
all by itself through the night, leaving her, after weeks of
repetition, with an in-built mechanism of obedience to the
voice that would be as deep, as compelling, as hunger, (p.
104)

Doctor No Revisited 43

We begin to wonder what was the message which Fleming
might have been trying to instill. Was it simply a "most harmless,
even a praiseworthy message," or, like Blofeld, did Fleming have
a more sinister intent? What was the pattern which he planned?
We might even ask, "Whose pattern?" as Bond did at the con-
clusion of Moonraker, when Sir Hugo Drax's diabolical plan to
blow up London might have succeeded "but for a whole pattern
of tiny circumstances, a whole pattern of chance."

Of course, the whole question of whether Fleming really did
have a master plan for the entire Bond series is one which his
fans and critics may speculate over for years (unless he left some
concrete direct evidence, perhaps in a secret file entitled "For
Your Eyes Only" or written in homemade invisible ink in his
own passport). I prefer to take as my starting point the chapter
in Casino Royale which points ahead to the development of a
portfolio of scenes, a collection of parables, proverbs, and
folklore about the devil in the shape of evil people. Perhaps
Fleming planned ahead for his little literary "game," his "spy-
story to end all spy-stories," just as Bond had planned ahead for
his evening's game at the Casino:

There remained an hour ... an hour to examine minutely
the details of his plans for the game, and for after the game,
in all the various circumstances of victory or defeat. He had
to plan the attendant roles of Mathis, Leiter, and the girl
and visualize the reactions of the enemy in various con-
tingencies. He closed his eyes, and his thoughts pursued his
imagination through a series of carefully constructed scenes
as if he were watching the tumbling chips of coloured glass
in a kaleidoscope. (CR, p. 44)

Actually Fleming has set up the whole pattern very neatly: by
introducing each of his major themes in the early novels, then
by bringing them into precise relationships and focus in Doctor
No, and finally by playing around with them in the following ad-
ventures, just as one spins the color chips in a kaleidoscope, de-
veloping various aspects and permutations. The simple little eight-
word plot which Fleming apparently utilized as the basic matrix
within which he manipulated all of his plots was just this: "St.
George slays evil dragon, rescues forlorn princess." Fleming's use

44 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

and transformation of this plot reflects his own real genius, for
this theme is the ideal vehicle for him to employ as an "objective
correlative" in parallel with his questioning the seven deadly sins
of the twentieth century. This theme is part of an ancient legend
which most people are acquainted with only superficially as a
cultural relic or cliche, but it has played an important role in the
traditional symbolism of the Christian faith because it represents
the continuing encounter between good and evil. First, therefore,
let's review this ancient theme, which strikes deeply into what
Jung has termed the "collective unconscious" of the human race,
and then we'll be able to see how Fleming has recast it in com-
pletely contemporary form.

The legend of St. George and the dragon has been retold in a
wide variety of ways ever since it was first melded onto the mea-
ger historical data concerning the early Christian martyr known
as St. George. However, the basic version may be summed up by
stating that there was once a small town somewhere along the
Mediterranean coast which had been threatened by a dreadful
dragon with poisonous breath. In order to guarantee that this
evil dragon would not destroy the entire town, the villagers were
required to furnish him with two small lambs every day. Since
their supply of lambs was soon exhausted, the villagers were
forced to -resort to drawing lots in order to select which of the
town's youth would be sacrificed instead.

This process continued until the day when the name of the
town's princess was drawn. With great sorrow the villagers led
her out to the swamp where the dragon lived and left her there
alone to die. Immediately thereafter, of course, that young noble-
man and soldier later known as St. George happened to ride by
and came to her rescue.

At this point there are two major variations of the legend. In
the first, St. George bad become identified with the chivalrous
knights of the Crusades and was able to kill the dragon only after
a great struggle. This scene of violence, often embellished with
the grisly remnants of previous victims as well as the terrified
maiden, has been depicted by such great artists as Raphael, Tin-

Doctor No Revisited 45

toretto, Carpaccio, Uccello, and Delacroix. The second version,
which appears in countless church panels and illuminated manu-
scripts, is more apologetic. In it St. George does not kill the
dragon immediately, but instead binds its neck with the prin-
cess's sash and leads it into the village. After suitably impressing
the townspeople with the necessity of their conversion to Chris-
tianity, he then kills the dragon in the village square. Refusing the
hand of the princess in marriage, he then distributes his reward
among the poor and rides off alone once more.

Thereafter, St. George reputedly continued doing noble deeds
all around the known world until the last and greatest of the
Roman persecutions of the Christians in A.D. 303, when he
hurried back home to protest the edict of intolerance proclaimed
by the Emperor Diocletian. Despite his subsequent arrest and the
wide variety of dreadful tortures which he miraculously survived,
he continued steadfastly to refuse the worship of pagan gods and
consequently was beheaded.

Such bravery has captured the imagination and given great in-
spiration to countless Christians, not only in his own time, as evi-
denced by the many churches dedicated in his name by the first
Christian emperor, Constantine, but also down through the ages.
St. George became the patron saint of many coastal towns, and of
soldiers and sailors. More especially he became known as one of
the seven great champions of Christendom and the patron saint
of England. The red cross of St. George emblazoned upon a field
of white was often carried as a banner or worn as an emblem
during the Crusades and it is still preserved as the central cross
in Great Britain's flag.

Undoubtedly only an Englishman could appreciate most viv-
idly the importance of the image of St. George as a dynamic
force within the history of his country. Men like Wordsworth,
Ruskin, and John Masefield are among those who have expressed
their appreciation for this image and mourned the times when it
was dormant. In earlier times St. George held a very special place
within the hearts of the people. St. George's day (April 23) was
once reverenced as highly as Christmas. Although King Henry
VIII was able to abolish all of the other nonbiblical and non-

46 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

apostolic saints* days from the calendar of the Christian church,
St. George's day remained as a day comparable to St. Patrick's
day for the Irish. (And King Henry VIII was the king to finish the
St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle!)

Shakespeare's historical plays abound with vivid dramatic evi-
dence of how the image of St. George permeated the life of the
English. There are countless examples of the stirring call to bat-
tle: "Then strike up drums: God and Saint George for us!" 4
which is expanded in King Richard the Third's climactic appeal:

A thousand hearts are great within my bosom:
Advance our standards, set upon our foes;
Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!
Upon them! Victory sits on our helms. 5

There is also the long speech of challenge by King Henry the
Fifth which begins, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends,
once more:" and concludes:

. . . The game's afoot!
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry "God for Harry, England, and Saint George!" 6

In addition there is evidence of the high honor in which the
Knights of the Garter were held (the order which was established
in 1350 by Edward III in honor of St. George and the highest
British recognition which is still being given today) as indicated
by Talbot's speech in the First Part of King Henry the Sixth:

When first this order was ordain'd my lords,
Knights of the Garter were of noble birth,
Valiant and virtuous, full of haughty courage,
Such as were grown to credit by the wars;
Not fearing death nor shrinking for distress,
But always resolute in most extremes. 7

As Christina Hole points out, the symbol of St. George rep-
resents "an enduring symbol of high courage, loyalty, and self-
devotion to the cause of the weak and endangered." 8 Although
Fleming has represented this image within the metier of the
secret agent, he is merely following the precedents of the visual
artists, who continually have represented the traditional image

Doctor No Revisited 47

within contemporary milieu, and of Edmund Spenser, whose
knight in Book I of the Faerie Queene is not revealed as St.
George until the end of his adventures. Tracing the elements of
this legend in the Bond adventures can become a fascinating
hobby. Strange as it may seem, the legend is revealed most
clearly in Doctor No, which may be paraphrased as follows:

Once upon a time on a small cold island there was a man carry-
ing great responsibility who became deeply concerned because
two of his countrymen had disappeared without warning on a
small warm island far away. He therefore called to him a very
brave man, who had just recovered from a miraculous brush with
death, and sent him out on a mission to find out what had hap-
pened. The brave man soon found out that other men were being
destroyed two by two, and he encountered a lovely maiden who
told him about an evil dragon which she had even seen quite
clearly one night when the moon was full:

It had two great glaring eyes and a long snout. It had sort of
short wings and a pointed tail. It was all black and gold. . . .
It went by me. It was making a sort of roaring noise. It went
over the marsh and came to some thick mangrove and it
simply climbed over the bushes and went on. A whole flock
of birds got up in front of it and suddenly a lot of fire came
out of its mouth and it burned a lot of them up and all the
trees they'd been roosting in. It was horrible. Tlie most hor-
rible thing I've ever seen. (DN, p. 74)

But, even though they were sitting near a swamp from which
all manner of curious beasts could emerge, the brave young man
apparently would not believe the maiden:

"... I can see you don't believe me," she said in a furious,
tense voice. "You're one of these city people. You don't be-
lieve anything. Ugh," she shuddered with dislike of him.

He in turn tried to answer her reasonably:

"Honey, there just aren't such things as dragons in the world.
You saw something that looked very like a dragon. I'm just
wondering what it was."

She replied very angrily:

"How do you know there aren't such things as dragons?

48 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

* . . Nobody lives on this end of the island. One could easily
have survived here. Anyway, what do you think you know
about animals and things?"

She then continued with a list of all the demonic actions that go
on between animals, asking him if he'd ever seen any of them
happen, like seeing a praying mantis eat her husband after they'd
made love, or a scorpion get sunstroke and kill itself with its own
sting. Since he hadn't, she dismissed him just like all of the other
"city people," and he attempted a feeble reply:

"Honey, now look here. You know these things. I can't
help it that I live in towns. I'd like to know about your
things too. I just haven't had that sort of life. I know other
things instead. Like . . ." (p. 75)

But after searching his mind, he couldn't think of anything as
interesting as hers, and so the brave young man switched her
attention to the evil Chinaman whom he suspected would try to kill
them. The next day, by the swamp on the island, the dragon
actually did appear, killing the brave young man's faithful com-
panion and then taking the hero and the girl captive.

The old myth disappears at that point because the "dragon"
turns out to be the black and gold painted marsh buggy sent out
by Doctor No which has been equipped with a flamethrower and
looks like a "float waiting for the Lord Mayor's Show." But the
simple story has done its trick, and by the strange alchemy of the
unconscious we are linked up with one of the most potent legends
in all history, the legend of St. George and the dragon. James
Bond then assumes his other identity, secret agent 007 then be-
comes the seventh great champion in all Christendom, and Flem-
ing performs the greatest sleight-of-hand operation in literature
since the Middle Ages when the original St. George theme was
linked with the bravery and courage of the Christian knights on
the Crusades, both in legend and in art.

In addition to being rather pedantic and boring, tracing Flem-
ing's pattern through the entire Bond series right now would only
spoil the readers' fun. There are a few blatant examples, of
course, which no one will fail to miss, such as Bond's rather tired
response in Goldfinger:

Doctor No Revisited 49

Bond sighed wearily. Once more into the breach, dear
friends! This time it really was St George and the dragon.
And St George had better get a move on and do something
before the dragon hatched the little dragon's egg he was
now nesting so confidently. Bond smiled tautly. Do what?
What in God's name was there he could do? (p. 155)

There is also the moment in On Her Majesty's Secret Service
when a low, white two-seater driven by a girl with a shocking-
pink scarf tied around her hair passes Bond as he is driving
along dictating in his mind a letter of resignation to "M." This is
too much for his split personality for:

H there was one thing that set James Bond really moving in
life, with the exception of gun-play, it was being passed at
speed by a pretty girl. . . . The shock of the windhorn's
scream had automatically cut out "George," emptied Bond's
head of all other thought and brought his car back under
manual control, (p. 17)

That same evening in the casino after Bond has redeemed the
girl's coup du deshonneur at the gambling casino, he reflects:

... he had taken a dislike to the monster from Lille. It
would be amusing to reverse the old fable first to rescue
the girl, then to slay the monster, (p. 27)

In general, however, most of the time Fleming disguises the
traditional material so that it can be picked up only obliquely.
The "dragons" are usually disguised in Moonraker Sir Hugo
Drax is the alias which Graf Hugo von der Drache, the unrepen-
tant Nazi, is using (Drache is German for dragon), and in
You Only Live Twice the "dragon" motif is initiated when Tiger
Tanaka orders Bond "to enter this Castle of Death and slay the
dragon within" (p. 66). When he attempts to do so, he finds
Blofeld again, this time disguised under the alias of "Shatterhand"
wearing a kimono:

The square-cut, heavily draped kimono, designed to give
the illusion of bulk to a race of smallish men, made some-
thing huge out of the towering figure, and the golden dragon
embroidery, so easily to be derided as a chSdish fantasy,
crawled menacingly across the black silk and seemed to
spit real fire from over the left breast, (p. 145)

Similarly, the princess from Trebizond (one of the locations

50 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

for her home) never appears precisely, although in From Russia
with Love Tatiana Romanova is a distant relative of the over-
thrown Russian dynasty and Darko Kerim is a man from Trebi-
zond. In addition, the girl named Ruby in On Her Majesty's
Secret Service happens to be the daughter of George Albert
Windsor and is described as standing there "like a great lovely
doll, passive, slightly calculating, wanting to be a princess" (p. 97).

Although many things about James Bond have been "shock-
ing" (especially in the movie Goldfinger), it will probably prove
more re-volting for many people on both sides of the prudent
curtain to accept this connection between secret agent 007 and
the legendary figure of St. George. Somehow it's easier to believe
that a supposedly good man can have an evil alter ego, such as the
dual personality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, than to imagine that
a devilish fellow like James Bond could possess the altar ego that
St. George used to be. But once this incredible proposition be-
gins to sink in, one can appreciate a little better the humor of
Ian Fleming's self-styled epitaph, "Oh, it's all been a tremendous
lark!"

There are two final bits of evidence which should help to con-
vince even the most skeptical readers. The first is a direct quote
from Fleming himself which he gave in an interview shortly be-
fore his death: " Tve got the usual vices myself Selfishness,
and so on,' Fleming confessed, 'But Bond is really a latter-day
St. George. He does kill wicked dragons after all.' " 9 The second,
which reinforces this statement, is a short sentence from On Her
Majesty's Secret Service:

"In my profession," said Bond prosily, "the exact meaning
of words is vital." (p. 76)

After appreciating something of the total meaning of the image
of St. George conquering the dragon, which is more important as
a whole image than the sum of its parts, it is necessary to break it
apart into its various elements to see how they relate to our syn-
copated society. In the next chapter we shall investigate the im-
plications of the image of the secret agent as a modern St.
George, and in subsequent chapters we shall take a closer look at
the major dragons threatening us.

OO4 - The Hot Image
in the Cold World

It is as if, beneath the words of contemporary speech
and in the images that crowd in upon his imagination, the
poet could sense the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual
worlds and possessed the capacity to make them
come alive again. 1 C. G. Jung

By one of the weird coincidences created by the strange al-
chemy of modern business practices within the motion picture in-
dustry, the fourth movie in the Bond saga, Thunderball, opened
in New York metropolitan area theatres on December 21, 1965.
The date in itself was not important, but the fact that it marked
the night of the winter solstice is intriguing.

The shivering fans, who were willing to tear themselves away
from preparations for Hanukkah and Christmas in order to wait
in line that night, probably couldn't have cared less, except that
the night was particularly cold and the wind biting. The producers
of the film undoubtedly were only trying to beat the Academy
Award deadlines, perhaps competing for the special effects
trophy against Goldfinger which had been released earlier in
the year.

Yet, if we consider that the James Bond phenomenon derives
much of its power from a genuine need for a contemporary hero
figure to slay contemporary dragons, then the coincidence is un-
canny. Suddenly this latest mass-media symbol had zeroed in on
the night on which in ancient times the first storytellers were
compelled by the terrors of primitive man to form images of hero

51

52 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

figures who could rescue the day from the terrors of the long
winter night! The figure of Bond consequently joins a long rank
of mythological and literary figures who have served as symbols of
transformation at various times of cultural crisis in the Western
world.

Within secular writings, such a list of heroes would include the
figures of Perseus, Hercules, Hiawatha, Beowulf, Rustam of
Persia, and Christian of Pilgrim's Progress, to name only a few.
Within the Old Testament and Apocrypha there are the stories
of David fighting Goliath and Daniel conniving against Bel and the
dragon. In the New Testament the book of Mark is full of the
stories of Jesus casting out demons, and the book of Luke pre-
sents the story of the temptation by the devil in the wilderness.
The allegorical book of Revelation contains the figure of the
archangel Saint Michael fighting against the dragon that ancient
serpent, who is the devil and Satan. Within the Christian faith it is
important to note briefly at this point that the earliest under-
standing of the atonement presented the dramatic, mythological
account of Christ's work as a victory over the devil: Christ is seen
as Christus Victor fighting against and triumphing over the evil
powers of the world, the "tyrants" under which mankind is in
bondage and suffering.

The appearance and public acceptance of the fantastic mytho-
logical elements of the Bond phenomenon at this time is of par-
ticular interest, therefore, for we are at a time in history when,
as Buber has pointed out, "the image-making power of the hu-
man heart has been in decline so that the spiritual pupil can no
longer catch a glimpse of the appearance of the Absolute." 2

The condition of the times is reminiscent of the scene in the
movie Goldfinger in which James Bond is left alone temporarily
in the depths of Fort Knox. His opponents are that monstrous
human parody, Oddjob, and a neatly packaged atom bomb which
has a timing mechanism moving down to zero. Can Bond manage
to overcome these two dragons of dehumanization and automa-
tion? Yes, but only after a manner of speaking. He does manage
to execute Oddjob and to break open the locked cover of the
bombcase, only to be confronted by an amazing array of spin-

The Hot Image in the Cold World 53

ning dials with variegated wires leading in and out of various
mechanisms. Then, as his hand reaches hesitantly first to one
unlikely spot and then another, the countdown edges closer to
the moment of detonation 1 12. ..111. ..110

However, before Bond's bumbling hands actually can do any-
thing, another hand competently reaches down over his shoulder
and flips off a simple switch. Help had arrived just in time help
which he had contrived the evening before by his appeal to
Pussy Galore's "maternal instincts." With a deft touch of humor,
the spinning dial stops exactly at 007!

Whatever elements may have been left out of Fleming's orig-
inal formula by scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and the special
effects teams when they responded to public interest in adapting
the Bond series for the movies, at this point they took the whole
saga one step further. Somehow the entire scene sums up the
fantastic gift of the storyteller who can build tension in the mem-
bers of his audience to a climactic breaking point and then release
it in one delightful moment of catharsis. But, even more signif-
icantly, the appearance of the Bond phenomenon at this particular
moment of countdown in history suggests that the power of the
creative artist to evolve images and symbols of transformation has
not been lost.

Although the introduction of the image of the secret agent is
accordingly of great significance at this time, before examining
it in detail, it will be helpful to review briefly the concept of
images in general. We are in a time when people in many fields
have become vitally concerned with images. Images can inform
and educate, they can relate or corrupt relationships, they can
form illusions or they can disillusion. Many corporations and fa-
mous individuals have hired public relations experts in order to
improve their public images. Much of our foreign policy has been
involved in attempting to maintain a particular image of our
country overseas. Even the United States Navy has admitted that
its image needs refurbishing, and there is at least one private firm
in New York City which advertises that it can help private indi-
viduals do the same.

Because a great deal of this activity is concerned with increas-

54 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

ing the illusions of the public about what is really happening or
about what is really real, instead of actually reporting the news or
improving a product or a person, Daniel J. Boorstin has written a
guide to the pseudo-events in America today in his book The
Image. From a slightly different perspective, economist Kenneth
Boulding believes that all of our behavior depends upon the im-
ages we hold and suggests that the image lies behind the actions of
every individual and accounts for the growth of every cause. By
understanding the image behind the individual or the cause, we
can begin to understand what gives each vitality and meaning. In
his book, also entitled The Image, he proposes an entirely new
interdisciplinary field for the study of images which might be
called "eiconics." 3

Actually images have been of interest to art authorities for a
long time in the field known as iconology, which (in art) is the
analysis of various elements within art objects, and a science of
"eiconics" might benefit greatly from such studies as Edwin Pan-
ofsky's breakdown of the elements of iconographical description,
analysis, and interpretation. From art experts such as Herbert
Read and Suzanne K. Langer and from psychoanalysts from Jung
to Daniel E. Schneider, we can learn how the creative artist is
able to re-present reality for the expansion of man's conscious
knowledge about himself. As Read points out in Icon and Idea:

It is only in so far as the artist establishes symbols for the
representation of reality that mind, as structure of thought,
can take shape. The artist establishes these symbols by be-
coming conscious of new aspects of reality, and by rep-
resenting his consciousness of these new aspects of reality
in plastic or poetic images. 4

Because of these creative representations of current reality,
the artist is able to help close the gap which results from the lag
between man's tool-making and myth-making processes and to
help reduce the tension in a syncopated society. The image serves
as the "symbol of transformation" by which past is knit to present
in order to provide a meaningful pattern of existence which is
valid for a particular point in history, never an absolute truth
valid for eternity. As a part of the myth-making process an image

The Hot Image in the Cold World 55

should be considered along with myth, which can be viewed not
so much as an intellectual precipitate of a society as "an idiom in
which given groups may communicate to each other both their
unity and their disagreements (E. R. Leach)." 5

Images are essential, therefore, for the communication be-
tween individuals which makes possible a positive sense of com-
munity. For, as Read states:

We establish love by communication, and over against the
unconscious group soul, we must create a conscious group
soul, a community of integrated and interrelated person-
alities. The means towards this end are always active. 6

It is in this context, then, that we may review the various at-
tributes of the image of the secret agent. The appeal of this image
is immediate, linking cold-war tension of the present with the
archetypal qualities of the hero figure of classical mythology, and
representing the past in the idiom of the present, not under the
banner of great literature but rather through the penetrating gift
of the popular storyteller to capture the spirit of the times.

As a symbol of transformation in the mass media, the image of
the secret agent is peculiarly resonant with both John MacMur-
ray's philosophical presentation of the "self as agent" and Diet-
rich Bonhoeffer's concept of the Christian as the responsible agent
or deputy (cf. his Ethics). It is important to note therefore that
the adventures of the secret agent present a radical shift from
the previous pattern of detective stories in which someone with
a problem could go to some cerebral figure in an armchair for a
pat solution to all of his difficulties. The hero or protagonist now is
the man with the problem or assignment himself, and it is in act-
ing within a situation that his mission is accomplished There is
no set answer which can be predicted rationally ahead of time.
Instead, the agent must be prepared to cope with any contingency,
to handle any emergency, and to think on his feet. The reader is
therefore involved in the reality of acting in the present rather
than cogitating over what has happened in the past. By devising
the image of the secret agent, contemporary storytellers there-
fore have responded not only to the real need for a hero figure
who can cope uniquely with contemporary insecurities or drag-

56 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

ons, but they also have grounded it in the social reality of the
times.

Actually the tension which Fleming and all the other writers
of the stories about spies and secret agents have been able to ex-
ploit is a ready-made one which they can market easily in our
syncopated society. It consists of several fuses to which they had
only to set a match: first, public curiosity regarding the secret
miniature war which apparently is being fought by secret agents
in obscure places all around the world; second, the insecurity re-
sulting from the contemporary search for identity in our highly
technological urban society; third, the lag which we have seen
resulting from man's tool-making (instrumental) capacities ad-
vancing faster than his myth-making skills (institutional proc-
esses).

Regardless of the accuracy, newspaper headlines in the last
twenty years have served only to pique public curiosity regarding
the shrouded exploits of such actual secret agents and spies as
Abel and Pentovskiy. The Powers' U-2 affair was just one of a
series of events which revealed the extraordinary extent to which
information and activities secret to most people are shaping the
destiny of the world. On the national level alone, such books as
Vance Packard's The Naked Society only serve to compound this
type of insecurity, for they provide evidence not only of the
mounting surveillance of private individuals due to the great in-
crease in organized living, but also the garrison state mentality,
which, coupled with the pressures resulting from our abundant
society, has made investigation into a successful private industry
with countless "electronic eyes, ears and memories."

Internationally, it seems quite possible to believe, as J. Ber-
nard Hutton has stated, that perhaps "one man's treachery, one
spy's success, could defeat half a world." Arthur Tietjen has said
that "security in an international context is a stranger to the free
world," and the multitudinous spy novels, movies, and television
programs only serve as primers in this type of cold war. Un-
doubtedly a great deal of the success of all the literature of vi-
olence and pursuit stems from the fact that (in Raymond Chand-

The Hot Image in the Cold World 57

ler's words) ours is "not a very fragrant world." British writer
Norman Shrapnel has suggested that the main advantage all the
writers in this genre have had is "surely the appalling relevance
of their subject matter to the real life myth and fantasy of the
day."

The unbelievably complex and tangled scheme of action within
the sphere of espionage and counter-espionage has been re-
vealed (with some accuracy one hopes) in more than ten books
regarding spy operations which were published in the first half of
the 1960's alone. Similarly, with the acceptance of the fact that
spies and secret agents are on the frontline defense of every na-
tion, public interest has created an entirely new fiction market,
with more than seventy spy-adventure novels and their varia-
tions published in 1965 alone. As Eric Ambler has pointed out,
even though the spy probably has been a member of the second
oldest profession in all history, it is only in recent times that the
public would accept the fact that such a traditionally despicable
character could be of importance to the international affairs of
one's own country.

The very real yet mysterious world of the spies has become
an object of concern for the average citizen who suddenly re-
alizes that his own night's sleep might depend upon the activities
or information gathered by some secret agent halfway around the
world. As Shrapnel states, the stories of "all the agents, dupes and
chorus of the frustrated ballet of violence in our time are chal-
lenged in preposterousness by one thing only the news in the
daily paper." 7

However, although the successes of the agents go unheralded
while their failures are trumpeted (as Kennedy observed re-
garding the role of the CIA in the Bay of Pigs affair), one sus-
pects that even the news in the papers may not be trusted. For
even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has stated (when apologizing for
the misinformation he had relayed as part of the cover story of
that debacle), he could never "take the testimony of journalism
in such matters seriously again," for their "relation to reality is
often less than the shadows in Plato's cave." 8 Consequently, the
public can only hope that some of the "fiction" written by those

58 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

familiar with actual espionage may parallel reality more closely
than the "facts" which have been printed publicly. Either way,
we would agree with Conrad Knickerbocker, who suggests that
the key to the great popularity of the spies rests in the "yearnings
of their readers. Baffled by Vietnam, angered by sonic booms,
they feel increasingly overwhelmed by the vast forces that now
shape events." 9

This intense interest in spies is paralleled by an equally strong
public desire to believe that the secret agent is actually just as
friendly and helpful as the old-fashioned grocer down on the
corner. It would be delightful to suppose that somewhere in the
obscure mists of overseas security operations, there could be
hosts of secret agents possessing not only James Bond's derring-
do but also the charm and finesse of Scott and Robinson from the
television program / Spy, or the tongue-in-cheek attitudes of the
men from U.N.C.L.E., or Secret Agent John Drake's under-
stated competence, or even Maxwell Smart's fortuitous flukes.

However, despite the delightful addictive quality of these tele-
vision versions of the spy game which attempt to reduce the
tensions of the cold war to a more human scale, another per-
spective of that game has been presented in the thrillers written
by John Le Carre, Len Deighton, and Adam Hall. In their hands
the secret agent is revealed as just another dirty pawn on the
chessboard of international politics, and espionage becomes just
another form of the "organization game." With these versions we
suspect that the "real" spy game is probably just as Knicker-
bocker suggests: a "technological super-system in which the in-
dividual operator, although still occasionally useful, is dwarfed by
the corporate efficiencies of machines and organizations. The real-
life heroes are not the cloak-and-dagger swingers but the anon-
ymous brethren of Francis Gary Powers."

At this point the fictional image of the secret agent as some
sort of superhero begins to shrink into a reasonable facsimile of
the anonymous man-in-the-street, differing only perhaps in the
extent of double dealings into which he may be manipulated as
part of the organization game. It is here that we may begin to see
a relationship between the image of the secret agent and the

The Hot Image in the Cold World 59

identity problem of the individual in mass society. The glamorous
adventures of the secret agent are only a fictional cover for the
peculiar form of existence which the technological age has forced
not only upon the agents but also upon the average individual as
well. To understand this relationship, however, we will have to
take a closer look at both the image of the secret agent and the
whole question of identity formation today.

In attempting to analyze the general image of the secret agent,
it is important to remember that we can. only indicate what ap-
pears to be a trend at the present time. One hundred years from
now social historians and anthropologists may be able to trace
the development of modern hero figures more accurately, just as
Paul Radin has studied the evolution of the hero myth in the cul-
ture of the Winnebago Indians. 10 Superficially we might suggest
that there is already preliminary evidence to suggest a parallel
progression from the early Trickster stage which began right
after World War II with Eric Ambler's "third man theme," into
the 1960's in which all three subsequent states appeared almost
simultaneously; the Hare which is an immature childlike figure
(Maxwell Smart, Henry Phyfe) ; Red Horn, a more mature solitary
hero with superman tendencies (James Bond, John Drake); and
the Twins, one extrovert and one introvert (Solo and Kuryakin;
Robinson and Scott).

However, in spite of the enormous variation in detail between
these contemporary secret agent figures, there are several gen-
eral characteristics which underlie the appearance of any one of
them. When these characteristics are combined they form a par-
ticular configuration, a "gestalt" or an image which is actually
unique to our time and to this genre. Various authors run per-
mutations upon this image whenever they build a story, either
consciously or not, and it is possible for us to examine it as a com-
plete entity in itself.

Perhaps the clearest, briefest, and least artistic summary of the
total image of the secret agent has been offered by the words of
the song which was used to introduce the television program
Secret Agent:

60 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND

There's a man who leads a life of danger,

To everyone he meets, he stays a stranger,
With every move he makes,

Another chance he takes,
Odds are he won't live to see tomorrow.

Secret agent man, secret agent man:
They've given you a number

And taken 'way your name! 11

Although this may not be a ballad which might be treasured
down through the ages, it does suggest many of the major ele-
ments of the secret agent image his anonymity, his solitariness,
his precarious way of living. Moving out from it, we can then
begin to examine more general characteristics.

Initially we might note that the secret agent is a man who has
been given a mission or an assignment of some kind, who is acting
all alone or at most with only one or two compatriots, his "felloe
professionals." Whatever he is doing, he has been given a certain
amount of responsibility and discretion commensurate with his
skill and background, but he is aware that his actions and the
little bit of information he gains are only a small part of a greatei
whole. For tension, of course, he has been assigned to a particu-
lar hot spot or a suspicious area, and generally it turns out thai
the fate of the entire free world rests upon his shoulders at that
point.

To continue, the next aspect we might observe is that he is
usually required to play a role, maintain a cover, and be trained
to the extent that his normal instinctive reactions are disciplined
so that his pseudo-identity may not be imperiled. As such, we
see that the expectation he is playing upon is that his "social
identity" will be able to camouflage his real or "total identity"
that observers will not suspect his private mission. The enemy
must not suspect who he really is or that he is really just acting
out a role for the benefit of his audience. In this process, his
"public self' is sharply split from his "private self' but he is
highly cognizant of the difference. In Erving Goffman's terms, the
secret agent's ability to maintain "role distance" would be a man-
ifestation of greater maturity; in Peter Berger's categories, the
secret agent is able to manipulate the strings of the social fictions

The Hot Image in the Cold World 61

in which we are all engaged. 12 Only rarely is the agent so involved
in his "pseudo-identity" that he "lives" his role in private as well
as public. In fact, the character Leamas in The Spy Who Came
in from the Cold is one of the very few who "compelled himself
to live with the personality he had assumed" and only rarely al-
lowed "himself the dangerous luxury of admitting the great lie he
lived." 13

In the area of the relationships which the agent maintains with
other people, we might note next that all of his associations are
transient as part of the requirement of his mission. He cannot af-
ford the luxury of projecting any of his own attitudes or presup-
positions onto another person; instead he must be shrewdly aware
of the other, not only on an intellectual basis, but also on a per-
ceptual or feeling level. At the same time he is skillfully trying to
maintain his own cover in order to protect his "private self' and
mission, he is also attempting to penetrate any false or pseudo-
identity of those around him. This is, in fact, a "reality-centered"
operation, as long as the agent is able to perceive persons as they
really are, and it is healthy from that standpoint It is only de-
structive if this perception is used to manipulate and destroy the
innocent.

Of course, one of the chief points which the general public
would include in the image of the secret agent is his highly tran-
sient relationship with girls. As long as the emphasis is placed upon
promiscuity, this is an extremely negative point. Truthfully, how-
ever, the association of sex without love in the image of the agent
is probably just as far from reality as was the old image in the
Middle Ages of the chivalrous knight romantically in love without
sex. Neither is probably true except in fantasy, but the hopeful
sign is the disappearance of the neurotic equation between sex
and an idealized concept of "romantic love." Sociologists Snell
and Gail Putney have noted in Normal Neurosis that the source of
many marital problems stems directly from just such immature
concepts of romantic love in marriage. If the image of the agent can
dispel the myth of this immature ideal, perhaps it may make a posi-
tive contribution to fidelity and genuine intimacy within marriage.

The agent cannot afford the luxury of sentimentality toward

62 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

personal belongings and possessions either. He is forced to "use"
things, instead of loving them. His only permanent personal pos-
session is his favorite weapon, and it is a traumatic occasion if the
spy-boss orders a change. The agent is generally supplied with all
the necessary gadgets he might need for his particular assign-
ment, but the fewer things he takes with him the better. His 1 ?
best weapon is his own body, and so he is also "armed" with the
knowledge of judo and karate. Because nothing can be left
around as a clue to his real identity, all of his clothes, possessions,
and even style of living become part of his role or cover, com-
pletely impersonal attributes as thoroughly transient as the rest of
his life.

In addition, one expects that the agent is loyal to his country
and to a vague concept of mankind in general, despite a very low
salary and lack of any private personal world of his own, except
when at home on leave. In short, he has been forced to know
himself as an individual well enough so that he can maintain his
value system regardless of any routine situation and particularly in
the event of any physical or mental torture. Accordingly, he is
required to be a man possessing high mobility, able to cope with
rapid changes and to take whatever action may be necessary. He
is therefore assumed to be highly responsible and autonomous
even in situations of great stress, crisis, and temptation. Thor-
oughly pragmatic and profane, he is an A- 1 candidate for the
world of the "secular city" which has been described recently by
Harvey Cox. And, if you review the last few paragraphs, you'll
observe that most of these characteristics would be quite typical
of the mobile, transient upper-management man of the 1960's.
Our question is not whether this is already present reality or not,
but rather just which aspects we might hope to prevent in the
future and which are inevitable. The split has occurred already
between one's "public" and "private" identities; the planned ob-
solescence of the production line already ensures a high turn-
over of one's possessions; and geographic and economic mobility
already disrupt relationships with one's family and friends. It may
be that only individual intimacy and commitment will be left in
the future.

The Hot Image in the Cold World 63

After considering these initial aspects of the image of the secret
agent and their possible relevance to contemporary life, the next
major element which should be reviewed is that of the agent's
"life of danger" and the crisis situations which he must face. Just
as in the typical cowboy tradition and all other genre concerned
with good guys versus bad guys, the agent must encounter the
enemy and engage in a subsequent fight to the finish. The new
element in the pattern of the secret agent genre, however, is a
certain type of scene which occurs almost without fail: the "black-
out" scene, which may even be found as a separate chapter head-
ing in some books. This scene generally consists of a brutal at-
tack which results in the agent's complete loss of consciousness,
followed by a gradual return to his senses, involving his percep-
tion of space, time, and identity. Although the situation of en-
counter may vary from author to author and from book to book;
it is a stock item in most plots. It can occur because of torture, as
in Fleming:

Bond wrestled with his consciousness. He screwed up his
eyes and tried to shake his head to clear it; but his whole
nervous system was numbed, and no message was trans-
mitted to his muscles. He could just keep his focus on the
great pale face in front of him and on its bulging eyes. * . .
The pain was nothing to what Bond was already suffering, but
it was enough to plunge him again into unconsciousness. (CR,
pp. 99-101)

or in an unexpected attack, as against Leamas in The Spy . . . :

His hands were still at his side as the blow came. It seemed
to crush his skull. As he fell, drifting warmly into uncon-
sciousness, he wondered whether he had been hit with a
revolver, the old kind with a swivel on the butt where you
fastened the lanyard. 14

and against Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm:

... I didn't see the dark-faced man move I wasn't looking
that way but I heard him. There was no point in dodging.
Where could I go? I just hoped he was good at his work, and
he was. The blow put me out instantly, with hardly any
pain at all. 15
However, the most interesting and unique development of this

64 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

particular detail of "blackout" is the one employed by Adam Hall
in The Quiller Memorandum, which I read long after I had form-
ulated my idea about the syncopated society. In this book (in
one of the tautest scenes in the genre) the "blackout" is ad-
ministered initially by hypodermic injections, but a second "black-
out" is described later which is achieved by Quiller's deliberate
induction in himself of the phenomenon of "syncope."

. She made another sound and I did the one thing that held
out any hope.

I fainted.

The last conscious memory was of Oktober reaching out
to save my hitting the floor. It was probably instinctive. I
was able, before blacking out, to note that he must be ig-
norant of the processes of syncope, or he wouldn't try to
keep me upright. The longer I remained upright, the longer
I would remain blacked out. 16

The significance of these scenes of "blackout," however, is not
the means of induction, from torture, attack, or voluntary sub-
mission, but rather the event itself, which is directly analogous to
the scene of death and rebirth, the loss of the "world-taken-for-
granted," flie rite of transition, whether you prefer to think of it in
psychological, theological, or anthropological terminology. They
are the proof text for the new strength of the hero figure who is
able to pass through "death" into a new "life" that he need not
face the condemnation which one character stood under in a Matt
Helm adventure: "He did not have the courage to die in a situa-
tion that required his death." 17

The recovery from these "blackouts" presents the occasion,
therefore, for "rebirth" with the recovery of consciousness and a
reorientation to the world:

In Fleming:

You are about to awaken 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 making any ef-
fort to disturb their sequence, although many of them were
terrifying and all were painful. He knew that he was in a bed

The Hot Image in the Cold World 65

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. (CR,pp. 101-102)

and Le Carr:

He was wakened by the lag singing and the warder yell-
ing at him to shut up. He opened Ms eyes and like a bril-
liant Alight the pain burst upon his brain. He lay quite stfll,
refusing to close them, watching the sharp, colored frag-
ments racing across his vision. He tried to take stock of him-
self. . . , 18

Hamilton:

"Tell them to find the woman," an oddly accented, liquid-
sounding female voice was saying, somewhere outside the
circle of darkness in which I seemed to lie. ... I was aware
that I was lying in the sun, probably in the spot where Td
fallen, and that a rock was gouging my thigh and an insect
crawling up my neck, but everything seemed very pleasant
and peaceful. I wasn't really playing possum. I had no urge
whatever to open my eyes. I was happy just to lie there
and listen. 19

Hall:

Voices again. Inga called something. Water running some-
where. A flash of light as Oktober brought the back of his
hand across my face. I was moaning. The shock of the water
as they flung it against my eyes. Full consciousness came
back and I had to feign continuance of the syncope, letting
my dead weight hang on their hands as they tried to wake
me, letting my lids droop and the eyes turn upward. 20

By establishing these particular scenes as one phase of the
crisis situation of the typical thriller, my concern has not been
over their literary merits, but rather their implications as part of
the image of the secret agent in relation to the identity crisis of
modern man. On an individual level we can presume that the
blackout scenes, either verbally as quoted above or visually in
the movies and television by swirling images and blurring of focus,
present an occasion for a contemporary rite of transition parallel
to the puberty rites of primitive man. But on a broader, social

66 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

level, we might consider a wide implication. For, in the conver-
gence of many factors, blind forces, and disillusionments in the
process of social syncopation, just as the secret agent suffers this
period of "blackout" or "syncope," the image of contemporary
man has been presented with a profound "culture shock" as well.

There is a wide variety of cultural instruments which may be
blamed for this form of cultural shock. Someone such as Wil-
liam Barrett would blame the Reformation for stripping the or-
dinary man of all the comforts, images, and dependency afforded
by the Catholic Church. On the other hand, Freud believed that
three insults had been presented against man's ego: the cosmic
insult of the Copernican revolution, the biological insult pre-
sented by Darwin, and his own psychological insult attacking
man's rationality. In addition, there is also the cultural insult pre-
dicted by such social critics as Marx, Tonnies, Durkheim, Simmel,
and Weber, who have depicted man as determined by economic
and societal factors, or the assault by the technology of modern
industry which Michael Harrington suggests has forced a com-
pletely accidental revolution upon mankind. However, it may be
that Western civilization is experiencing a delayed shock wave
from the real impact of the Christian gospel now hitting with
direct intensity with the disappearance of the Greek metaphysical
thought-systems and the removal of the cocoon of Christendom
which S0ren Kierkegaard insisted had deluded the world into
thinking that all are Christians as a matter of course and that the
world (or Christendom) could be Christianized. As he said, "The
fundamental misfortune of Christianity is Christendom." 21

But whatever way one might wish to describe the particular in-
sult afforded man's ego, the fact remains that sometime in the last
twenty years our particular civilization passed a certain point of
no return. The factors precipitating this transition point, which
were first recognized aesthetically on the intuitive level by the
creative artists within the last century, are now recognized cog-
nitively on a multidisciplinary level in the universities and even
more viscerally by the average man, for they hit him where he
lives. On a wide cultural basis we've been knocked out, just like
the secret agent or Rip Van Winkle, and are just beginning to

The Hot Image in the Cold World 67

regain consciousness in a world which has changed overnight
The agent's "blackout" is the analogue for our "culture shock"
or "syncope" and there's no turning back. This is not necessarily
an evil, for with all of our illusions knocked out of us, perhaps
our choices may be clarified. As Ernest Becker states:

To be unconscious of the crucial factors in the situation to
which one is adjusting, is to repeat as an adult the early
slavery of the child. It is to consent to have one's choices
constricted by the accidents of being thrown into a certain
kind of world, a world beyond one's powers, beyond one's
right to question, beyond one's capacity to change. 22

The term "culture shock" has usually been reserved for in-
ternational travelers who suffer what Enrique Vargas has termed
the*"jet-age malady." However, in a broad sense, one might com-
pare it to the stories of the African natives who refuse to go so far
in one day that their souls cannot catch up with them during the
night. In a cultural sense then, "culture shock" would result if the
institutions had been outdistanced technologically. It may have
been relatively simple for a primitive tribe to accept the innova-
tion of the wheel, for instance. However, the very possibility that
modern technology could make what has previously been termed
"work" obsolete is causing a wide variety of social repercussions.

In the jet travelers* case, Vargas observes that the shock is
"precipitated by the distressing feelings of uncertainty and anx-
iety that result from not finding all the familiar symbols, signs,
and cues that guide a person through his culture." 23 However, the
term "culture shock" seems even more appropriate for the modern
man who has been attacked from all sides theologically, cos-
mically, biologically, psychologically, culturally, and technologi-
cally; who has been rendered senseless, lost his image of himself
and of his God; and who is now reawakening, trying to reorient
himself spatially, temporally, and morally.

This concept of culture shock is even more significant when
we consider it in relation to the problem of man's identity in the
twentieth century. For, as Vargas suggests, the extent of culture
shock which an individual experiences will depend "first of all,
upon the amount of change he can experience without having to

68 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

feel that his sense of personal identity is being threatened; and
secondly on his degree of involvement in a foreign experience
and how much it differs from what he has been used to." 24

The image of the secret agent assumes particular importance
at this point, not only because of his ability to survive the ex-
perience of culture shock on his missions around the world and
the blackouts inflicted by his enemies, but also because of his
capacity to maintain a sense of identity and integrity despite his
anonymity. Consequently this image is as vitally significant for
the image of Western man during the tumultuous changes of this
century as the image of the medieval knight was for the radical
cultural shift which occurred following the Middle Ages. The
knight was an identification figure sine qua non for the move-
ment into the towns by a group of people who had been ninety
percent agrarian, offering the symbol of a man whose allegiance
was beyond his family or his land or even his liege-lord. Similarly,
since our civilization is moving into a social structure which is
rapidly becoming ninety percent urbanized, we need an image of
man which can survive in these conditions. The images of the
knight and of the secret agent both present hero figures who are
required to be "inner directed" in order to survive, who are able
to exercise responsible autonomy instead of a sickly heteronomy
following the fleeting vagaries of popular fancy. I think we would
deceive ourselves if we were to suppose that these figures are not
just as "tradition directed" as any other, because most societies
produce the type of individual required for survival. But, in this
case, tradition requires an image of a strong masculine person-
ality who is able to maintain himself in boundary situations with-
out the customary social support from family and peers. The
knight was bound to a rigid code of behavior in his tradition, but
the secret agent image reveals the mobility and flexibility re-
quired within a fluid social situation.

Since World War II, social scientists have shifted their view-
points regarding the possibility for man to reorder any society
from the ground up, and the individual has been viewed as
dwarfed by a multitude of factors beyond his personal control.
As Allan Wheelis has stated, it is not possible to view the life of

The Hot Image in the Cold World 69

any man apart from the society in which he lives, for "there is no
man whose life has not been shaped from birth to death by its
cultural matrix." 25 Consequently, since man is a social animal
nurtured by the process of socialization, the major question is
whether or not a particular society requires and provides support
for individual autonomy on a responsible basis.

Actually too many critics of this age are bewailing the dreadful
pressures which they believe are directed against the individual.
The situation is not quite so simple and is in fact highly con-
tradictory: the mobility and flexibility which are necessary for a
highly urbanized, technological society require individuals who
are able to survive rapid dislocation and transient situations. The
problem is not necessarily just that the individual suffers aliena-
tion from his traditional sources of support, for all too often these
backgrounds are limiting and alienating in themselves. The prob-
lem is that individuals do become so closely attached to the
world they have always taken for granted and to the social iden-
tity, or "persona," which that world imposed upon them, that any
transition may cause culture shock. Unfortunately contemporary
society has been forcing these transitions without providing the
institutional bases for individual support. In our form of synco-
pated society which often fails to provide appropriate rites of
transition, each individual is forced into a peculiar battle for the
survival of the fittest on psycho-sociological terms, such as Durfc-
heim's studies of anomie and suicide revealed. Those who are
unable to win this battle are lost, unless they can be reoriented
within a simpler, more paternalistic type of group, such as the
Synanon groups presently offer the dope addict.

In a mass society, each individual faces an attenuated version
of the anonymity which is part of the image of the secret agent,
particularly the two facets suggested in the television song quoted
earlier: first, "to every one he meets, he stays a stranger," and
second, "they've given you a number and taken *way your
name." The anonymity in itself is not the primary issue; for once
the conditions of a particular reality are recognized explicitly,
man may begin to evaluate which aspects might be changed and
whicli must be accepted. As Viktor Frank! observed concerning

70 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

the dreadful existence of the prisoners in the Nazi concentration
camps:

. . . any attempt to restore a man's inner strength in the
camp had first to succeed in showing him some future goal.
Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear
with almost any how, 99 could be the guiding motto. . . .
Whenever there was an opportunity for one, one had to
give them a why an aim for their lives, in order to
strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence.
Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no
purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon
lost. 26

The particular reality which modern man is being shocked into
realizing and accepting is the most terrible how of man's exis-
tence: first, that his destiny is to be alone and to be aware of be-
ing alone, and then to be responsible in this new awareness.
Anonymity and depersonalization are "dragons" quite justifiably
feared in a society whose process of socialization has been based
upon other-directedness and heteronomy instead of mutual re-
spect, cooperation, and self-transcendent autonomy. However
those dragons are only paper dragons, for identities which can be
lost this way were only "paper identities" from the beginning.
Although not without cost, we can view their loss then as an oc-
casion for new maturity and responsibility.

One of the most difficult ideas to accept about the process of
individuation, however, is that it ultimately leads to a greater
sense of community and responsibility, rather than to a blatant
sense of individualism and irresponsibility. 27 The process of de-
personalization might be considered in a new light as an ex-
tremely painful process which forces the childish ego to drop its
"persona," which is the role or mask behind which one plays a
social role or game, and to accept its "shadow," which is the hid-
den aspect of all one would prefer to ignore about one's self. By
losing the persona and accepting the shadow, one becomes aware
of the wider world and sensitive to its reality and needs. By no
longer being enclosed within the petty personal world of an im-
mature ego or limited to the role of a pseudo-self or a paper
identity, one then may drop the position of an "actor" in the

The Hot Image in the Cold World 7 1

world and assume the responsibilities of the "agent." The world
may then be perceived as a network of social fictions, such as
Berger suggests in The Precarious Vision, or as a gigantic playing
field for the "games people play'* (cf. Eric Berne), a world in
which one possesses the courage to be and to become. In Paul
Tillich's words:

This is why God Himself cannot liberate man from his
aloneness: it is man's greatness that he is centered within
himself. Separated from his world, he is thus able to look
at it. Only because he can look at it can he know and love
and transform it. God, in creating Tn'm the ruler of the earth,
had to separate him and thrust him into aloneness. Man is
also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by man. He
can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. He
has the freedom for good and evil. Only he who has an im-
penetrable center in himself is freed. Only he who is alone
can claim to be a man. This is the greatness and this is the
burden of man. 28

The emergence of the image of the secret agent therefore has
a much greater significance than that which might be suggested by
box-office receipts or by book-club sales. As a symbol of trans-
formation, it points ahead toward a positive image of man who is
able to act creatively and responsibly in the "world come of age."
Its appearance not only provides a direct contradiction to the
idea that modern man may dispense with myth, but also reveals
man's continuing need for fresh symbols to create and sustain
community.

OO5 The Devil
with James Bond!

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves.

And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought. . . .
"Jabberwocky"
Lewis Carroll 1

**We Scots have a tremendous appreciation of the
worlds of the devil." Sean Connery (referring
to himself and Ian Fleming) 2

Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to
stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not
contending against flesh and blood, but against the
principalities, against the powers, against the world
rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual
hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Ephesians 6:11-12 (R.S.V.)

What on earth does James Bond have that countless other spies
and secret agents do not have?
From one perspective we might admit, e *Not much/' for one by

73

74 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

one the others can surpass Fleming's secret agent: John Drake
(of Secret Agent) has presented a far purer image of the secret
agent as a hero figure, more akin to the old cowboy prototype
strong, virile, dedicated to restoring single-handedly the balance of
good over evil, more inclined to kiss his horse than a girl. Quiller
is more intelligent, Peter Trees the Third more elegant, Maxwell
Smart more bumbling, Nick Carter more lascivious, Leamas more
victimized, Tiger Mann more violent, Matt Helm more cynical,
Deighton's agent more realistic, Boysie Oakes more fantastically
improbable, and so on. It would be difficult indeed to claim that
Bond is remarkable in any of these categories, or that his ad-
ventures are representative of good spy literature, which Fleming
once suggested should be "full of loose ends and drabness and
ultimate despair." He even stated that perhaps only Somerset
Maugham, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler had caught the
"squalor and greyness of the Secret Service." 3

Yet all this merely substantiates Fleming's statements that
originally he had never meant Bond to be more than an interest-
ing character to whom extraordinary things happen, an entirely
anonymous instrument whom the action of the books would carry
along. He admitted that Bond was an "author's pillow fantasy,"
typical of the adolescent type of mind which he admitted pos-
sessing himself. He thought of Bond essentially as a man of action
in a violent age, and described him with such adjectives as hard,
ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic, sensual, and hedonistic. As he said,
c *Bond is healthy, detached; disengaged a sort of amalgam of
romantic tough guys, dressed up in twentieth-century clothes,
using twentieth-century language. Although I wove around him
a great web of excitement and fantasy, I think he is slightly
more true to the type of modern heroes like the spies and
commandoes of the last war than any of the rather cardboard
heroes of the old-style thrillers." 4

If there is nothing particularly unique about Bond even in
Fleming's own characterization of him, what then could be out-
standing about this particular secret agent? What remains after
one eliminates the girls, the guns, the wines, and the cars? In
short, what does Bond have which the other agents are missing?

The Devil with James Bond! 75

The answer lies in another dimension, for the one thing which
Bond has which completely overshadows all the others is his rep-
ertory of villains his honest-to-goodness, larger-than-life villains
which he must encounter and destroy! These are extraordinary
villains indeed far from the campy extremes of television's Bat-
man series, for on one hand they are the twentieth-century drag-
ons lying in wait for a twentieth-century St. George, and on the
other hand, in the poetic fancies of our subconscious, they are the
modern personifications of the devil in new clothes.

By establishing this repertory of villains, with one bold stroke
Fleming jumped obliquely across the chessboard of contemporary
literature with his twentieth-century knight and commenced the
hero quest of this age. With blithe indifference to literary styles
and a sincere recognition of the limits of his own literary capa-
bilities, he carried out his peculiar ploy right under the averted
noses of critics and commentators who have been longing for
such a hero figure. With daring presumption he ignored the fash-
ionable posture of the existentialists who bemoan the loss of
meaning in our age of ambiguity. Instead of a man dangling by the
puppet strings of contemporary malaise a la Herzog, he has pre-
sented a professional capable of mission and responsibility. From
a shoddy "world full of grey," Fleming leaped into a technicolor
world with a new palette of vivid sins for portraying our times.
One by one he carefully set up the false gods of our society just
like ducks in a carnival shooting-gallery and then proceeded to
knock them down.

Take away the girls and the guns in almost every other secret
agent story and there's nothing left but an empty balloon from a
neatly configured scheme of intrigue. Take away the girls and
the guns from Fleming's saga, tighten up the gaps between the
thirteen adventures, and you have a series of hero deeds com-
parable to those of the Red Cross Knight in Edmund Spenser's
Faerie Queene or of Bunyan's Christian in Pilgrim's Progress.
Before investigating this twentieth-century saga, however, we
need to examine the peculiar requirements for the hero quest
today, a quest which has been proposed on both external (so-
cietal) and internal (psychological) bases.

76 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Although most modern men in our syncopated society are much
too sophisticated to admit either being afraid of the dark or of the
devil, there is one group of social critics who point gloomily to
other specters which loom menacingly against the horizon and to
social dragons which need slaying. Jn order to understand this
perspective, E. V. Walter suggests that the idea^of progress,
which was the central myth of the Enlightenment, has become
inverted and unrecognized in a new dominant myth of our post-
modern age which results in a 'familiar bleak fantasy of civilized
man trapped in a technological wasteland." 5

This mood is reflected by the anthropologist Eric Wolf who
has suggested that in contrast to the subjective emotional per-
spective of the humanists, anthropology has become "but a lat-
ter-day version of the descent into hell, into a strange and bizarre
underworld, in which the hero disguised as The Investigator
walks untouched among the shades because he carries in his hand
the magic sword of Science." 6 He suggests that the cold postwar
world is a "world of enormous societies pitted against each other, '
a world of dinosaurs in which the big lord it over the small, in
which the facts of social and cultural dominance are inescapable,"
In addition to suspecting that there is now much less room for
external change in the world, he feels that the cold realities of the
postwar world reveal human nature as less flexible than earlier
optimists had hoped:

It is the apparently inherent dilemmas of human existence
that strike our consciousness, not the hope of their tran-
scendence. If human nature has set limits, then 1 i also ap-
pears changeable only within such limits. 7 * J^

In contrast with this perspective which perceives coiromporary
dragons to be exterior and social, there is another group of social
critics who believe the primary quest of the creative hero to be
internal. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell
has portrayed the breakdown of the old symbol systems provided
by former mythologies based either upon animal and plant
worlds or upon the celestial spheres. He perceives that the prob-
lem today consists of "rendering the modern world spiritually
significant . . . making it possible for men and women to come to

The Demi with James Bond! 77

full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life."
He suggests, furthermore, that man himself is now the crucial
mystery:

Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism
must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be cruci-
fied and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be
reformed. Man, understood however not as "I" but as
"Thou": for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe,
race, continent, social class, or century can be the measure
of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine ex-
istence that is the life in all of us. 8

Because of this Campbell believes that the individual cannot
wait for society to "cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized
avarice, and sanctified misunderstandings," but rather the cre-
ative hero must begin to guide and direct society.

Similarly, Esther Harding has observed in Journey into Self
that whenever the collective safeguards of civilization have been
undermined, when social and religious dominants begin to decay,
individuals are left to grapple with the archetypal symbols them-
selves and the process of individuation. Much of the powerful
public appeal which Pilgrim's Progress had during the seven-
teenth century was derived from its new guidance for the indi-
viduals who had been shaken by the disintegration of the former
established ways of life provided by feudalism and Catholicism.

This perspective is amplified, moreover, by Stanley Romaine
Ifppper,' who has observed that what we perceive outwardly as a
cultural phenomenon of our time is "experienced inwardly as
alienation, abandonment, isolation, and solitariness.*" He suggests
therefore that the calling of the poet today is that of 'alienation
and return. "And on the journey he must encounter all the dragons
of the inner life, including those let loose by the breaking of the
chains of custom." But, even more, since he believes that the
"problems of order and of calling today are not merely psycho-
logical, but also ethical and religious," Hopper would prefer to
state that "modern literature, like St George, has gone out to
capture dragons." 9

After considering these viewpoints, there is a certain humor-

78 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

ous element regarding our analogy between James Bond and St.
George. Judging from the great quantity of negative comments
about the movie version of James Bond as well as those which
we have quoted already from book reviews, it would seem more
satisfying for many people to call secret agent 007 the devil him-
self, instead of the dragon-slayer! Simply for the sake of accuracy,
one must admit that there are in fact many points of similarity be-
tween Bond and that old prince of demons known as Asmodeus,
who was famous (or infamous) for his gambling, his success
with women, and his ingenuity and charm as well as for his in-
dictments against social evil. 10 Of course, since Fleming did sug-
gest that perhaps the old list of seven deadly sins might be closer
to virtues today, maybe in his perspective we could suggest that
old demons could be closer to saints.

However, the point to be made is that the devil has two major
tricks, one of which is letting men believe that they have identi-
fied him in the wrong place. His other trick is much more subtle,
for, as Baudelaire pointed out, "The Devil's cleverest wile is to
convince us that he does not exist." The emergence of the new
group of death-of-God theologians might easily have been pre-
dicted from the earlier demise of the devil. Even though the
devil was one of the most persistent characters portrayed in the
Bible, today we would have to agree with Denis de Rougemonf s
perception: "like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, the
Devil has in our day completely disappeared, leaving only a grin
hovering in mid-air which is imperceptible to people in a hurry." 11

The danger which the devil presents to modern man is there-
fore more insidious than carbon monoxide gas. Just as this deadly
gas is twice as effective because it is indiscernible to our sense of
smell, so too the devil may act more efficiently because he has
tricked us into believing that "nobody but nobody" believes any
more in sprightly little red devils with horns or those in black
union-suits with tails and pitchforks or even those old blue
devils of melancholy. This trick is exceptionally efficient, for as
de Rougemont comments :

Thus, the more he prevails in our lives, the less we are able
to recognize him. The more effective he is, the less danger-

The Demi with James Bond! 79

ous he appears. His own activity conceals him from the eyes
of the one it dominates. He vanishes in his success, and his
triumph is his incognito.

The proof that the Devil exists, acts and succeeds is pre-
cisely that we no longer believe in him. 12

Because the devil has been so successful in his campaign to
convince us that he no longer exists, under the cover of his sub-
sequent anonymity he has gradually been able to enlarge his
sphere of operations. His ultimate strategy, of course, is designed
to separate man completely from God. Although this campaign
appears to be progressing satisfactorily at present, it is linked to
several secondary skirmishes. The battle against man's belief in
hell has almost been concluded victoriously, and those against the
affirmation of this world as God's creation and the realization of
individual sin and responsibility have advanced significantly. The
one attack which has had a slight reversal lately has been the
attempt to eliminate completely man's recognition of his own
death. The removal of the elderly and the fatally ill to secluded
places for retirement and dying had represented an advance for
the devil's side, but he has had to retreat since then following
the recent debates over the high cost of many funerals. Unfor-
tunately morticians* attempts to preserve the illusion of "no-
death" was becoming too expensive causing the "Scotch" among
us to register a financial protest and consequently giving the the-
ologians a chance to question the drift of men's thinking!

Needless to say, any counterattacks against this sinister, under-
cover campaign of the devil must be mounted very carefully,
because the insulation of contemporary Pharisees has become
quite heavy. C. S. Lewis was able to penetrate some of our con-
temporary defenses several decades ago in his Screwtape Letters,
but generally anyone attempting to produce a modern version of
Dante's Inferno with its nine concentric circles of hell would be
quickly laughed out of court. Now that the concept of a three-
story universe consisting of heaven, earth, and hell has been safely
relegated to the categories of outdated myth and metaphor, no-
body wants to worry about hell being here and now unless it is
proclaimed at some comfortable distance at Selma, Alabama, or

80 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Buchenwald and Dachau. Any suggestion that the contemporary
battle of Satan's minions against the angels of the Lord is con-
tinuing to be waged within some unconscious realm of our own
particular soul is blocked out of conscious awareness immediately.

One of the subtle indications which Fleming gave to his readers
in order to suggest that he was providing a contemporary descent
into hell was the scene in Moonraker when Bond was sufficiently
surprised by some great crimson words being proclaimed by a gi-
gantic flashing sky-sign that he stopped his car for further investi-
gation. The reader's curiosity is aroused at Bond's amusement
when he discovers that a building had merely been blocking out a
few letters from a Shell advertisement: "SUMMER SHELL IS
HERE." But, with more complete data at hand, we might easily
be convinced that Fleming's primary concern is to announce pre-
cisely the same pre-apocalyptic message which originally had at-
tracted Bond's attention: "HELL IS HERE . . . HELL IS
HERE . . . HELL IS HERE."

One must readily admit that Fleming's version of hell lacks
both the grandeur and depth of its portrayal given by Dante and
Milton. Nevertheless, his work bears particular significance on
several accounts: first, that millions of readers around the world
have already been exposed willingly to his symbolism; second,
that this symbolism is peculiarly appropriate to the spirit of the
times; and third, that, regardless of its literary merits, Fleming's
work presents a highly sophisticated theological viewpoint con-
cerning the nature of man. These points deserve particular
commendation not only because they reveal that Fleming's personifi-
cations of the devil are accurate representations of the tempta-
tions which surround us daily, but also because he was able to
present very profound concepts in an entertaining fashion on a
level of communication available to a vast world audience.

Although other admirers have already commented upon Flem-
ing's abilities to maintain tension in such scenes as the bridge
game against Sir Hugo Drax in Moonraker, the golf game against
Goldfinger, the torturous journey through the tunnels in Doctor
No, and the ski chase scene in On Her Majesty's Secret Service,
there has been little comment about the brief, biting scenes of

The Demi with James Bond! 81

social criticism which represent Fleming's first attack against the
"OK" world of today. These scenes range from the satiric por-
trayal of the sophisticated, sparkling dinner scene at Blades where
the elegant diners are surrounded with vulgar scenes of the Hell-
fire dub (Moonraker), the self-righteousness of the health fad-
dists in Thunderball, the living graveland of death in St. Peters-
burg (Live and Let Die), the vacuity of the women gamblers in
Las Vegas (Diamonds Are Forever"), the snobbery and pride of
those engaged in tracing their family genealogies (On Her Ma-
jesty's Secret Service) to more savage indictments suggested by
the spellbinding scenes with Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die,
the various modern courts of the devil depicted in the organiza-
tion meetings of SMERSH, SPECTRE, and the different criminal
syndicates, and most particularly the description of Shatterhand's
quick efficient "Disneyland of Death" for those desiring more
immediate forms of suicide (You Only Live Twice). As just one
illustration of Fleming's rejection of the cheapness and super-
ficiality of many aspects of contemporary life, we might turn to
the comments made by Felix Leiter and Bond concerning St
Petersburg:

"It makes you want to climb right into the tomb and pull
the lid down," said Leiter at Bond's exclamations of horror.
. . . Bond groaned. "Let's get away from here," he said.
"This is really beyond the call of duty." (LLD, p. 90)

However, these scenes of banality represent only the first level
of Fleming's perspective of our modern hell, just as the surface
of the sea only masks the activity going on at the deeper levels
where his real targets lurk:

How safe it was, slipping through the night in this ridiculously
vulnerable little boat. How kind and soft the sea could be.
. . . Bond thought of what was going on in the hundreds of
fathoms below the boat, the big fish, the shark and barracuda
and tarpon and sailfish quietly cruising, the shoals of king-
fish and mackerel and bonito and, far below in the grey
twilight of the great depths, the phosphorous jellied boneless
things that were never seen, the fifty-foot squids, with eyes
a foot wide, that streamed along like zeppelins, the last real
monsters of the sea, whose size was only known from the

82 THE DEVIL "WITH JAMES BOND!

fragments found inside whales. What would happen if a
wave caught the canoe broadside and capsized them? How
long would they last? (DN, pp. 66-67)

The primary action of the Bond series is centered therefore
upon those intangible representatives of the devil who are lurking
anonymously in the shades just beyond the borders of our con-
scious attention. One by one Fleming has snared these monsters
within his nets and dragged them out where they may no longer
remain incognito; one by one they may be counted off in Flem-
ing's own book about the devil and his disciples. By examining
them, accordingly, we may be able, as Bond had wished in Casino
Royale, to "learn the nature of evil in all its forms, with parables
about evil people, proverbs about evil people, folklore about
evil people"!

One of the first suspicions we might have regarding Fleming's
modern repertory of demons is that possibly they could reflect his
revised perspective concerning the nature of the seven deadly
sins. As we have seen earlier, in his introduction to The Seven
Deadly Sins, Fleming had suggested that being possessed of the
ancient seven (Envy, Pride, Covetousness, Gluttony, Sloth, Lust,
and Anger) one might still go to heaven, whereas he believed that
"to be afflicted by the modern variations can only be a passport to
hell." His revised list of what he termed the seven deadlier sins,
therefore, had included Avarice, Cruelty, Snobbery, Hypocrisy,
Self-Righteousness, Moral Cowardice, and Malice. In addition, on
the side he also included Sloth in its extreme form of accidie,
as the only one of the original seven which would have his own
wholehearted condemnation. If Fleming did use this new list of
deadlier sins for the personification of the devil in modern dress,
his work would be entirely congruent with such earlier English
moralists as Chaucer, Langland, Bunyan, and Spenser, all of
whom had included the earlier lists of sins in various forms for
their own generations.

However, by doing so, Fleming would provide a remarkable
addition to the field of English literature, because Morton W.
Bloomfield has suggested in his exhaustive study of the seven

The Devil with James Bond! 83

deadly sins that Spenser's work has been considered to be the
last great treatment of the sins. As Bloomfield points out, since
Spenser the concept of these sins has not died out, "but it was
never again to occupy an important part in life and culture. The
tradition of the Sins was dead; they no longer evolved; they no
longer inspired great writing." 13

It is already apparent from Fleming's list of revised sins not
only that he is interested in restoring both the concept and the
tradition of the sins, but also that in his work the sins have evolved
and do reflect the changing circumstances of our generation. In
addition, we may even suggest that perhaps his versions are more
fully characterized than those of his predecessors. For example
we can point to the long confessional scenes between Bond and
his villains. These long dialogues far surpass the simpler confes-
sional scene in which the various sins speak out in their own
voices in Langland's Piers Plowman, a scene which Bloomfield
has considered to be the greatest treatment of the cardinal sins
in English literature because of its "masterly combination of the
abstract and the specific."

In illustration of this point, by rapidly running down Flem-
ing's list of the "seven deadlier sins," it is quite obvious that
Goldfinger is an outstanding elaboration of the evils of Avarice.
In their first meeting, Bond is impressed by Goldfinger's relaxed
attitude, which "showed in the economy of his movement, of his
speech, of his expressions. Mr. Goldfinger wasted no effort, yet
there was something coiled, compressed, in the immobility of the
man." Immediately thereafter, however, Bond is repelled by
Goldfinger's grotesque, "out of proportion" appearance and pro-
ceeds to give a very Adlerian type of psychoanalysis of how
Goldfinger got to be the villain that he is. Later in the book,
Goldfinger's own confession is a masterful revelation of the moti-
vation impelling the actions of a modern Midas:

"Mr. Bond " For the first time since Bond had known
Goldfinger, the big, bland face, always empty of expression,
showed a trace of life. A look almost of rapture illuminated
the eyes. The finely chiselled lips pursed into a thin, beatic
curve. "Mi. Bond, all my life I have been in love. I have

84 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its
divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft slim-
iness that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that
I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And
I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a
true golden syrup. But, above all, Mr. Bond, I love the
power that gold atone gives to its owner the magic of con-
trolling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one's every wish
and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds,
even souls. Yes, Mr. Bond I have worked all my life for
gold and in return, gold has worked for me and for those
enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you," Goldfinger
gazed earnestly at Bond, "is there any other substance on
earth that so rewards its owner?" (p. 135)

Although such long confessional speeches are presented by all
the most evil of Fleming's villains directly, in several other cases
he allows other characters to present external judgments con-
cerning the nature of particular sins. For example, although the
sin of Snobbery is represented in its extreme by the Count de
Bleuville in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (actually Blofeld in
disguise), the major speeches against snobbery and vanity are
given by Sable Basilisk as he briefs Bond on his cover story. The
health faddists in Thunderball illustrate the sin of Self-Righteous-
ness most satirically, and even "M" and Bond succumb to this
type of temptation temporarily. Although it is possible to suggest
that Sir Hugo Drax (Moonraker) illustrates Moral Cowardice,
since he commits the dreadful act of cheating at cards, actually
Darko Kerim's speech in From Russia with Love strikes more
deeply into the hidden implications of this sin, because he re-
veals the mistake of falsely assuming the laws of any earthly game
are ultimate. Although all of Fleming's villains present varying
degrees of Malice and Cruelty, these sins are most diabolically
represented by the villainess, Rosa Klebb, the sadistic mother
figure who specializes in human torture and whom Fleming de-
scribes a la Whistler's mother in the conclusion of From Russia
with Love.

In addition, many of Fleming's villains personify Hypocrisy,
for they attempt to deceive the general public by appearing un-
der the cover of decent law-abiding citizens. Superficially Jack

The Devil -with James Bond! 85

Spang (Diamonds Are Forever) is a model citizen, but actually he
directs the operations of an evil syndicate responsible for a vast
network of organized crime, ranging from bookmaking, narcotics,
and organized prostitution to smuggling diamonds. Although os-
tensibly Sir Hugo Drax has gained the stature of one of Britain's
new national heroes, underneath this superficial facade of a gen-
tleman of propriety he actually is obsessed by the desire for
revenge against his Fatherland's enemies and secretly is plotting
to bomb London.

As we continue to examine Fleming's villains more carefully,
we begin to recognize also that they are not only representations
of his list of "seven deadlier sins," but that their descriptions also
present a historical progression of the characteristic descriptions
regarding the devil. His first archfiend, Mister Big (Live and Let
Die), personifies one of the earliest forms of the demonic for he
is a black devil. According to Maximilian Rudwin, a black face
was a permanent feature of the medieval representations of the
devil, and in Scotland today it is still a common belief that the
Devil is a black man.

Four of the later villains possess another typical characteristic
of the devil, red hair: Sir Hugo Drax, Red Grant, Goldfinger, and
Scaramanga. With a completely bald head, however, Doctor No
is typical of the tradition of the devil as long, lean, bald, and
cadaverous. Since Blofeld completely changes his appearance
two times from one book to the next, his personification is not
only typical of the "blues" version of the devil, but also that of
Archimago in Spenser's Faerie Queene, which parallels that tra-
ditional concept of the devil's amazing ability to assume a variety
of forms. As opposed to all of the "larger-than-life" type villains,
the figure of Scaramanga in the last book presents an incongruous
letdown, unless one suspects that he represents the most con-
temporary identification of the devil as just man himself, a lat-
ter-day Adam who is depicted consuming the serpent in the mid-
dle of a modern Garden of Evil.

All of these analyses are incomplete, however, for they fail
to account for Fleming's statements regarding Sloth, accidie, which
he said had bis wholehearted condemnation, perhaps because in

86 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

moments of despair he had "seen its face." As we have noticed
earlier, he had defined this sin as a form of "spiritual suicide"
and a "refusal of joy," which is a return to the original monastic
and ascetic understanding of accidie as spiritual dryness rather
than the medieval and puritanical concept of sloth as mere lazi-
ness.

That accidie continued to be Fleming's prime concern is evi-
dent as we examine the entire series. In doing so, we see that the
specter of accidie is constantly revealing its face to the reader in
a variety of forms. In a mild version it is present in two of the
minor villains, Emilio Largo, who made a "fetish of inertia," and
Rosa Klebb, whose besetting vice was a laziness combined with a
psychological and physiological neutrality which was able to re-
lieve her of "so many human emotions and sentiments and de-
sires."

However, the face of accidie is presented with greatest force in
the descriptions and confessions of Fleming's three major vil-
lians: Mister Big, Doctor No, and Blofeld. As the first of this
demonic trio, Mister Big represents the aesthete, who states that
he is suffering from "boredom or accidie," because he is able to
take pleasure only in artistry, in polish and finesse, and who is
impelled by a mania to "impart an absolute rightness, a high ele-
gance, to the execution of his affairs," each day setting "higher
standards of subtlety and technical polish so that each of [his]
proceedings may be a work of art."

The second, on the other hand, is the technician, as repre-
sented by Doctor No, who is characterized by a "supreme in-
diiference" and a mania for power "to do unto others what had
been done unto [him], the power of life and death, the power to
decide, to judge, the power of absolute independence from out-
side authority ... the essence of temporal power." He agrees
with Bond that power itself is an illusion, but adds, "So is beauty,
Mister Bond. So is art, so is money, so is death. And so, probably,
is life." He confesses that in his early years he "loved the death
and destruction of people and things," and now, in addition to his
other diabolical plans, he is engaged in experiments to determine
how much the human body can endure. As he says, "You see,

The Devil with James Bond! 87

Mister Bond, I am interested in the anatomy of courage in the
power of the human body to endure. But how to measure human
endurance? How to plot a graph of the will to survive, the toler-
ance of pain, the conquest of fear?"

The most imposing personification of accidie, however, is the
one presented in the third and most demonic version by the figure
of Blofeld, specifically in his last characterization as "Shatter-
hand" in You Only Live Twee. In his final encounter scene with
Bond at his Castle of Death, he appears as a modern version of
Giant Despair, dressed in a "magnificent black silk kimono across
which a golden dragon sprawled" and proceeds to deliver the ulti-
mate apologia for Sloth, as he explains his demonic "Disneyland
of Death":

I will make a confession to you, Mister Bond. I have come
to suffer from a certain lassitude of mind which I am de-
termined to combat. This comes in part from being a
unique genius who is alone in the world, without honour
worse, misunderstood. No doubt much of the root cause of
this accidie is physical liver, kidneys, heart, the usual weak
points of the middle-aged. But there has developed in me a
certain mental lameness, a disinterest in humanity and its
future, an utter boredom with the affairs of mankind. So, not
unlike the gourmet, with his jaded palate, I now seek only
the highly spiced, the sharp impact on the taste buds, men-
tal as well as physical, the tickle that is truly exquisite. And
so, Mister Bond, I came to devise this useful and essentially
humane project the offer of free death to those who seek
release from the burden of being alive, (pp. 216-217)

After a vicious battle, first by Bond's stave against Blofeld's
sword and then hand to hand, Bond is able to destroy this version
of Giant Despair and blow up his Doubting Castle. And at this
point, many themes begin to converge. Not only does James
Bond represent a modern St. George, but the primary dragon or
devil which he must battle is that of the capital sin of our genera-
tion, the sin of sloth, the accidie which is a refusal of life and joy,
the utter indifference, carelessness, and inertia in short, the
feeling of apathy with which we began this study.

The face of accidie is the face which is haunting both social

88 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

scientists and theologians, but it is also the monster which is
threatening to choke our civilization. In From Russia with Love
Fleming states at one point that the "blubbery arms of the soft
life had Bond around the neck and they were slowly strangling
him." A little later he allows a curious quotation to slip into
Bond's mind: "Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first
make bored."

Since Bond's fight is our fight as well, in the next chapter we
need to explore the various dimensions of the struggle against
accidie that enemy which the theologians would call sloth and
the social scientist would term apathy.

OO6 "Where's the Action?"

The curse of America is sheer, hopeless, well-ordered
boredom; and that is going someday to be the curse
of the world. Rudyard Kipling

People no longer seem to know why they are alive;
existence is simply a string of near-experiences
marked off by a period of stupifying spiritual and
psychological stasis, and the good life is basically
an amused one. . . . Standing around with nothing coming
up is as close to dying as you can get. Unless one
grasps the power of boredom, the threat of it to one's
existence, it is impossible to "place" the delinquent
as a member of the human race. Arthur Miller 1

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate
them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence
of inhumanity. The Devil's Disciple

George Bernard Shaw

"And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: . . .
'I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot.
Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you
are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew
you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have
prospered, and I need nothing; not knowing that you
are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked. ...**"

Revelation 3:14-17 (R.S.V.)

The interesting advantage which we have in adapting the leg-
end of St. George and the dragon to the contemporary problem of
accidie or apathy is that it speaks so eloquently to our situation.
Why did the villagers capitulate so readily to the dragon's de-
mands? Why did they allow temporary expediency to result in the

89

90 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

sacrifice of their children? Why did they ignore the Roman pre-
cept: Principiis obsta (Resist the beginnings)? The villagers them-
selves may be said to symbolize the inertia inherent in group
action, the phenomenon of public apathy and the prevalent re-
sponse of "Let George do it!" And, even though our dragon today
is an apathy threatening to poison our entire society, it is just
because the problem is so acute and yet presents such an in-
tangible force, that it is able to produce the same numbed reac-
tion within our society that the original dragon did among the
villagers so long ago.

The one minor detail missing from the early legend which
would need to be added today to complete the imagery would be
a study committee of scientists and theologians who would begin
analyzing the destructive power of the dragon and begin recom-
mending possible countermeasures to combat its deadly effects.
In the meantime, however, due to cultural expediency, the young
people would continue to be sacrificed in lieu of the entire so-
ciety. Even though the dragon known as apathy is intangible, its
handiwork is obvious to careful observers.

Probably the most vociferous of the many commentators who
have been examining the problem of apathy have been those so-
cial scientists and therapists forced to deal with its victims daily.
These experts generally consider it a symptom of psychological
malaise due to various forms of cultural dysfunction. They relate
it to a host of associated symptoms, in a manner which could be
compared to the grasping tentacles of the giant squid boredom
and the incapacity for leisure, "anomie" (normlessness) and de-
spair leading to suicide, juvenile delinquency and public apathy,
the decline of the superego and the increase of moral cowardice,
all of which combine to produce a syndrome of decay and death.

The most petrifying conclusions which may be drawn from
serious research and experience is that apathy is the inevitable
monster haunting urban life, whether it cripples those imprisoned
by the hopeless despair of the slums, smothers those surfeited by
affluence in the suburbs, or reduces all those in between into the
faceless anonymity of the masses. A wide variety of writers point
to the vicious cycle of urban life, with its cacophony of noises and

'Where's the Action?" 91

the incessant drain of nervous energy. Periods of stimulation and
boredom are seen oscillating with ever-increasing intensity: fast,
the search for greater excitement and thrills, followed by an in-
evitable letdown from satiation, the deadening of affect and per-
ceptions. Those who are able to escape this vicious alternating
current all too often are magnetized by an even deadlier direct
current, illustrated by the frantic busyness of those unable to
find pleasure either in work or leisure, who are constantly on
the go and never able to relax. Their motto: "Where's the ac-
tion?"

There is an almost prophetic ring to the indictments being
made by many of these secular authorities. In his comprehensive
survey of the history of cities, Babylon Is Everywhere, Wolf
Schneider concludes that weariness and disgust are the inevitable
consequence of city life. V. S. Pritchett, while examining the
temptations of boredom, points out that that phenomenon, which
was once termed the royal sickness of kings, has now become the .
central sickness of industrial man. Erich Fromm perceives that
indifference to life is an inevitable reaction to an ever-increasing
industrialism. Allan Wheelis attributes the vague, all-pervasive
uneasiness of many individuals seeking personal therapy to the
decline of the superego and the subsequent loss of a sense of
meaning. Bruno Bettelheim suggests that the seduced passivity
and dependency induced by an all-powerful bureaucracy cannot
help discouraging men from facing life actively, which results in
the atrophy of the decision-making capability and the failure of
responsible autonomy.

In addition to these secular prophets whose observations are
generally limited to the discussions of symptoms and syndromes,
there are others who have begun to correlate such perceptions
with more theological insights. For example, Dr. Karl Menninger
has recognized the intangible factors affecting mental and emo-
tional health. In his book, The Vital Balance, he suggests that
both skeptics and believers can be united on one side against
their common enemy which is evil:

Evil goes in many guises and is called by many names.
Perhaps the best name for it is the old-fashioned person!-

92 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

fication, the Devil. It has two faces the destructiveness itself,
with the suffering and loss it causes, and the indifference to it
of those more fortunate. 2

He is particularly concerned over what he terms the "com-
placency of the comfortable," for he sees this as the "indifference,
the apathy, the hardness of heart which troubles neither to believe
nor to doubt, but simply does not care." In addition, he would
join Norman Cousins in the conviction that our greatest enemy
today is not "some powerful nation or totalitarian power con-
trolling world ideology," but rather (in Cousins' words) :

... the man whose only concern about the world is that it
stay in one piece during his own lifetime ... up to his hips
in success . . . [who] not only believes in his own helpless-
ness, but actually worships it [assuming] that there are mam-
moth forces at work which the individual cannot compre-
hend much less alter or direct. 3

In a similar manner, the sociologist Robert K. Merton has
stated that the syndrome of "anomie," cultural normlessness,
which has been of particular interest to sociologists ever since
Durkheim, is related directly to the phenomenon which for cen-
turies the church had identified as the sin of "accidie," the sloth or
torpor which indicates that the "wells of the spirit run dry," 4

This relationship is clarified when we examine R. M. Mac-
Iver's definition of anomy (his spelling) as the state of mind of
one "who has been pulled up by his moral roots, who has no
longer any standards but only disconnected urges, who has no
longer any sense of continuity, of folk, of obligation." He sees
the anomie man as one who has become "spiritually sterile, re-
sponsive only to himself, responsible to no one. He derides the
values of other men. His only faith is the philosophy of denial. He
lives on the thin line of sensation between no future and no
past." 5

From these statements it is obvious how the spirit of apathy
threatens modern man, but a historical review of the phenom-
enon reveals that inertia and indifference constantly have been
among man's most persistent enemies. The word "accidie" itself
meant "carelessness" and was used most often to condemn those

"Where's the Action?" 93

who failed to bury the dead. It is used in this sense in both the
Iliad and Odyssey, but it assumes the additional meaning of leav-
ing one's possessions or guests uncared for as well. Hippocrates
uses this word in one of his medical books and, in a letter to At-
ticus in 45 B.C., Cicero expressed his concern over the latter^
"acedia." Moreover, the term was used within the Septuagint,
in both Psalm 119:28 and Isaiah 61:3 where it expresses a
"faint heart" or a deep "spirit of heaviness."

Despite these many illustrations of the awareness of the prob-
lem of accidie, it is the unique recognition of the Christian faith
that indifference to life is actually one of the seven deadly sins,
a symptom of the loss of faith. This Christian perception stands
in direct contradiction to several philosophies of life as well,
not only to the Stoic conception of a noble apathy with which the
ideal, virtuous, wise man faced life, but also the Epicurean form
of serenity, which manifested itself in the avoidance of pain in the
search for pleasure as the highest and only good.

It is in Christianity that we see the boldest attack launched
against the syndrome of decay and death which is initiated by the
capital or source sin of accidie. In Christ men were called out of
their encapsulated selves, invited to turn around (repent) and
greet the Kingdom of Heaven near at hand. They were called out
from a pathological preoccupation with law and guilt, from an end-
less quest for self-achieved righteousness, from a living death,
and invited into a life full of joy, grace, love, and hope. Jesus
pointed out that a thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy,
but that he had come so that men might have life and have it
abundantly. He implored men to give up the self which the world
bestows and to find their true selves in him. In the parable of the
servants, he proclaimed that those who were faithful with the
talents entrusted to them would enter into the joy of their master,
while the wicked and slothful servant who lacked courage to in-
vest the money would be condemned and cast into outer dark-
ness.

However, within the New Testament, it is the word "com-
passion" which provides the most direct contradiction to the spirit

94 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

of apathy. Although there are at least five Greek words used to
indicate compassion, the one which is transliterated as splag-
chnizomai is the one used in the parables of the Prodigal Son and
the Good Samaritan:

Luke 10:33-34: But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to
where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion,
and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil
and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him
to an inn, and took care of him.

Luke 15:20: And he arose and came to his father. But while
he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had com-
passion, and ran and embraced him, and kissed him.

Now this particular Greek word is not a namby-pamby word.
Instead it is intended to portray a completely visceral reaction to
the situation depicted. In completely vernacular terms, it denotes
a "gut-level" response, for literally it means to "have one's bowels
yearning." It was not used only in these parables, but it was also
the word used in the Synoptic Gospels to describe Jesus' re-
actions to the needs of persons around fri'm the hungry crowd
(Mark 8:1-9), the blind men (Matt. 20:29-34), the leper (Mark
1:40-42), and an epileptic boy (Mark 9:14-29). It applied not
only to the times when he was on the road, but also to the times
of his own deep grief:

Matthew 9:35-36: And Jesus went about all the cities and
villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gos-
pel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every
infirmity. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for
them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep
without a shepherd.

Matthew 14:13-14: Now when Jesus heard this [about
the death of his cousin John the Baptist], he withdrew from
there in a boat to a lonely place apart. But when the crowds
heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. As he
went ashore he saw a great throng; and he had compassion
on them, and healed their sick.

This compassion, however, which Christ demonstrated in heal-
ing those broken in spirit and body was not limited merely to

"Where's the Action? 39 95

restoring a simple status quo. The book of Mark presents Jesus'
constant battle against all of the evil forces which seek to destroy
men and to separate them from the love of God. The progression
of Christ's struggle against the demonic may be illustrated on
several levels: the cosmic dimension in the story of his tempta-
tion by the devil in the wilderness when his power through the
Holy Spirit was first demonstrated; the personal dimension in the
series of exorcism narratives in which he drives out those demons
holding individuals in bondage; the historical dimension of the de-
bates with the Jewish authorities in which he is depicted not only
acting in history but also seeking to clarify its meaning. James M.
Robinson has pointed out that the pervasive trend in Mark, there-
fore, is to associate Jesus' words with his action:

. . . for Mark the authority of Jesus' teaching resides not in
its force of logic or the originality and profundity of its con-
tents, but rather in the power inherent in him as Son of God
and bearer of the Spirit, a power which is revealed by the
efficacy of his word. When he speaks, God acts: in casting
out a demon, in healing a paralytic, in forgiving sin, in ad-
dressing his people at worship. . . . For Jesus' word is
action. 6

The climax of Jesus* victory over the demonic, however, is not
manifested until after the cracifixion and resurrection, when at
last its power is decisively broken and the power of God's will for
man is established in history. For more than a thousand years it
was this simple idea of the Atonement which gave Jesus' dis-
ciples and followers the courage to act in the conviction of God's
grace and power in history. In Christ men were freed from the
idea of a cosmic power of evil and consequently able to per-
ceive it as clearly contrary to God's sovereignty over the entire
universe. Sin, evil, and death were henceforth subordinate images
of all that which God has excluded from his will for mankind; love,
grace, and joy were signs of his continuing love and redemption.
In Christ the old man Adam lost his vitality and a new Adam was
born. Men were called to be the heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven
with Christ, no longer slaves to sin or bond servants of the law,
but responsible in the world and intended to work out their sal-

96 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

vation with "fear and trembling" and the power of the Holy
Spirit. Karl Earth has probably given the most emphatic recogni-
tion to this distinction in a discussion on the sloth and misery of
man. Restates:

The direction of God, given in the resurrection of Jesus
Christ who was crucified for us, discloses who is overcome
in His death. It is the man who would not make use of his
freedom, but was content with a low level of a self-enclosed
being, thus being irremediably and radically and totally sub-
ject to his own stupidity, inhumanity, dissipation and anx-
iety, and delivered up to his own death. 7

It is here then that the essential meaning of the sin of accidie
becomes most clear. It is a symptom not only of spiritual aridity
but the loss of the whole meaning of salvation. It is the opposite
of the process which used to be called "sanctification" by earlier
theologians. According to Paul Tillich's analysis, the process of
sanctification should mean increasing growth in four areas: first,
the increasing awareness of the world around us, which leads to
the power of affirming life despite its ambiguities; second, the
increasing freedom from the letter of the law, which leads to the
power to "judge the given situation in the light of the Spiritual
Presence and to decide upon adequate action"; third, increasing
relatedness which means not only relating to one's self in solitude
but also to others in community; and fourth, increasing self-
transcendence, which means a deeper, more mature relationship
with God. 8

It is only with recent years therefore that the various per-
spectives of social scientists, philosophers, and theologians have
begun to converge in their opinions about the question of ac-
cidie: the only major difference perhaps being that the secular
writers would prefer to use the term "syndrome" for the various
aspects of the problem which theologians would call "sin." Harvey
Cox has suggested that apathy is the key form of sin in today's
world, Joseph Pieper has stated that despair and the incapacity
for leisure are twins, that leisure is "only possible when a man is
at one with himself, when he acquiesces in his own being, whereas
the essence of acedia is the refusal to acquiesce in one's own

"Where's the Action?' 9 97

being.'* Esther Harding has commented upon the numerous oc-
casions in Pilgrim's Progress when Christian encountered sloth:
in person in the Slough of Despond and the Doubting Castle of
the Giant Despair, and in other figures from the man in the iron
cage (despair) to Sloth himself. She states that sloth is "perhaps
the most fundamental and deep-seated urge of the psyche," and
that it often "blocks the way to any change, and especially to that
transformation process through which the purely animal man may
evolve into a self-aware, conscious personality composed of spirit
as well as body." She relates the phenomenon of depression to
sloth and the "deliberate choice of ease," and believes that it is a
"moral problem with which it was necessary to struggle as against
a giant or dragon."*

This shift in thinking about accidie and apathy bears a distinct
correlation to the conversation between the two characters, Au-
gustine and Franciscus, in Petrarch's Secretion. Morris West has
provided a new fresh translation of this work written by a man who
has been called the father of the Renaissance and who struggled
with the problem of accidie six hundred years ago. Franciscus
complains about his depression but admits that this plague gives
him a certain kind of "atrocious black satisfaction." Everything
he sees, hears, and feels afflicts him, and he blames it upon his
life within the city. Augustine, who is really Petrarch's more ma-
ture self, rejects Franciscus' self-pity and claims that by his own
free will he could escape from the two golden chains which fetter
him, his vain desire for love and glory. He questions the purpose
of Franciscus' labors and fervent studies, and states, ". . . you
already know all that is needful for life and death. It would be
better for you to apply what you know to your conduct" He con-
cludes by calling upon Franciscus to surrender aH of his works, to
given himself back to himself, and to begin to think deeply about
death. 10

Accidie therefore is the refusal not only of joy, but the refusal
of the new life made possible in Christ. Kierkegaard saw it as the
"despairing refusal to be oneself," when one cannot give his con-
sent to his own being or be at one with himself. It is the rejection
of the promise of being born again, a sterile stillborn condition in

98 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

which one continues in the helplessness of sin and guilt from
which Christ had fought to redeem mankind. Since basically
therefore it is the rejection of God's love in Christ, it inevitably
results in defective love for others as well as for oneself. It mani-
fests itself either in an utter indifference to others or in a busy,
shallow "works-righteousness" which fails to perceive others or to
relate to them.

Just as Ivan Karamazov then, we see the slothful "handing
God back his ticket" to life. As Karl Olssen suggests, the slothful
is the "no-care, waving away existence with a gesture of the
hand; he is the Bored." 11 Or, as James Pike and Howard A.
Johnson indicate, the slothful is working "like the devil" because
he

hasn't worked to live; he has lived to work. He has, in fact,
had no other life. Like all slothful people, he's bored with
life, afraid of life. His own life is empty, so he works in the
effort to fill up that big void. 12

The slothful, therefore, are those incapable of leisure, of the
sense of wonder for life and the creative activities which bring new
forms of beauty and charm to existence. Instead they are on an
endless treadmill, seeking for pleasure which they never seem to
find, caught up in a pseudo-good life which is basically unreal, a
paper-doll world of only two dimensions as long as boredom
and as wide as despair. As Arthur Miller points out, their good
life is the "life of ceaseless entertainment, effortless joys, the
air-conditioned, dust-free languor beyond the Musselman's most
supine dream. Freedom is, after all, comfort; sexuality is a photo-
graph. The enemy of it all is the real. The enemy is conflict. The
enemy, in a word, is life." 13

There is only one possible antidote, therefore, for the sin of
accidie the slap into awareness by the real encounter with
death. It is for this reason that the spirit of apathy and boredom
disappears during wartime and other occasions of crisis when men
are forced to re-evaluate the fundamental premises for their
existence. The recognition of this aspect of the problem was sug-
gested in the mock haiku poem which Bond composes in Fleming's
next-to-last book:

"Where's the Action?" 99

You only live twice:

Once when you are born,

And once when you look death in the face.

It is important to realize, however, that although men may
learn to treasure life as they begin to see it slipping from their
fingers, it is the Christian conviction that enables men not to fear
death as life's enemy but rather to transcend it with the power of
love. It is Christ who reminds men: "This night your soul is re-
quired of you!"

OO7 From Bond
to Bonhoef f er

Leiter to Bond: "Maybe you can strike a blow for Freedom,
Home and Beauty with that rusty old equalizer of yours." (DF,
p. 90)

Bonhoeffer: Yet our business now is to replace our rusty swords
with sharp ones. 1

"Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have
not come to bring peace, but a sword." Matthew 10:34 (R.S.V.)

For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-
edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints
and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the
heart. Hebrews 4: 12 (R.S.V.)

A rather poignant description of our times was given recently
by Arthur Miller. In an article entitled "The Bored and the Vi-
olent'* he expressed his concern over the problem of juvenile de-
linquency, which he considers to be "our most notable and violent
manifestation of social nihilism." Most solutions for this problem,
however, he viewed as "spiritless" for "they do not assume that
the wrong is deep and terrible and general among us all. There is,
in a word, a spirit gone." Although he could suggest no way to
recapture this spirit himself, he described it with remarkable ac-
curacy:

I do not know how we ought to reach for the spirit again but
it seems to me we must flounder without it It is the spirit
which does not accept injustice complacently and yet does
not betray the poor with sentimentality. It is the spirit
which seeks not to flee the tragedy which life must always

101

102 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

be, but seeks to enter into it, thereby to be strengthened by
the fullest awareness of its pain, its ultimate non sequitur.
It is the spirit which does not mask but unmasks the true
function of a thing, be it business, unionism, architecture,
or love. 2

Although Ian Fleming was never quite as explicit about his con-
cern for today's youth, there are many instances in his work
which suggest that his awareness of the situation parallels that of
Arthur Miller. In one passage in Thunderbdl, for example,
after describing the cheap self-assertiveness of a foxy, pimpled
young taxi driver, he allows his secret agent to reflect about the
boy's situation:

This youth, thought Bond, makes about twenty pounds a
week, despises his parents, and would like to be Tommy
Steele. It's not his fault. He was born into the buyers'
market of the Welfare State and into the age of atomic
bombs and space flight. For him, life is easy and meaning-
less, (p. 13)

Most of Fleming's direct comments about the problem of ju-
venile delinquency per se, however, may be found in one of his
secondary books, Thrilling Cities, which is a series of thirteen
"mood pieces" about the "world's most exciting, exotic and sinful
cities." Although this travelogue contains many passages of charm-
ing insights into various people and cultures, for the most part it
is a gloomy, understated survey of our rather shabby world and
the depressing outlook for today's youth. There is a delightful
irony about the book consequently, because the sins which Flem-
ing chose to depict are generally not the ones the casual reader
would be looking for, but ones which are akin to his list of the
"seven deadlier sins."

Besides exposing the tawdry lingerie hidden beneath the glam-
orous skirts of many cities, Fleming also provides a series of
quick deft sketches highlighting the problems of international
crime, escapist drugs, moral hypocrisy, the dehumanizing aspects
of much modern architecture, and the decline of moral standards.
He specifically quotes the four reasons for juvenile delinquency
which had been listed in 1959 by the Los Angeles chief of police

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 103

in short, the decline and fall of former values, the direct in-
fluences of adult criminality, the increasing emphasis of our society
upon materialism without effort, and our attempt to substitute
scientific proficiency for social responsibility. 3 Most specifically,
however, upon his return from a globe-encircling trip of thirty
days, he raises the specific question of why British influence has
disappeared so rapidly over half the globe and suggests that the
situation can be reversed only by rekindling the "spirit of adven-
ture" so that "our youth can heave itself off its featherbed and
stream out and off across the world again." 4

Although Arthur Miller and Ian Fleming have pointed to two
aspects of a spirit which seems to be missing today, there is
another dimension of this spirit which we might term that aspect of
true iconoclasm which is able to puncture not only our personal
pretensions of pride, pomposity, and false piety, but also those
false images which we have set up for contemporary idol-worship.
It is able to unmask such hypocrisy and delusions of grandeur,
but it does not absolve us from responsibility and action. Al-
though initially the image of the "iconoclast" might suggest a
negative concept of one who attacks cherished beliefs as sham, it
really should indicate the rejection of the religious use of images,
one who opposes idolatry in every form.

In his book Wait Without Idols, Gabriel Vahanian has pointed
out that iconoclasm is the essential ingredient of monotheism and
suggests that true iconoclasm "begins with oneself, with the smash-
ing of one's own idols, i.e. one's superannuated conception of
God, of faith and religious allegiance." 5 This concept may be
further clarified by Richard Niebuhr's studies of radical mono-
theism, for he states:

When the principle of being is God, then He alone is holy
and ultimate sacredness must be denied to any special be-
ing. No special places, times, persons, or communities are
more representative of the One than any others are. No
sacred groves or temples, no hallowed kings or priests, no
festival days, no chosen communities are particularly rep-
resentative of Him in whom all things live and move and
have their being. 6

As we begin to tie these various perceptions together in rela-

104 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

tion to the various discussions regarding accidie in previous
chapters, it is only natural to suggest that the spirit which seems
to be missing in Western civilization is that of the image of St.
George. Certainly for centuries this image was able to capture
the imagination of countless generations of youth. We can point
to a variety of evidence which may be used to suggest that the loss
of the spirit of strength and courage exemplified by St. George
may result in the growth of boredom and apathy.

Chaucer, for example, gave one of the strongest indications
of this relationship in his Canterbury Tales when the Parson
states that the virtue of fortitude (strength) was the essential
remedy against what he termed the "horrible sin of acedia."
Terming this sin the enemy of man in every condition and the
source of all despair, carelessness, and "that dull coldness that
freezes the heart of man," he saw that, in its ultimate degree,
"acedia" would produce not only lack of devotion, but also the
sin of worldly sorrow (tristicia) which he stated would slay man:
"For, verily, such sorrow works the death of the soul and of the
body also; for thereof it comes to pass that a man is bored by his
own life." He perceived fortitude therefore as the virtue which
could conquer this sin because of its various aspects of magnanim-
ity, faith, and hope which could give man the force of character
to despise annoying things. He saw this virtue as

so mighty and so vigorous that it dares to withstand sturdily,
and wisely to keep itself from dangers that are wicked, and to
wrestle against the assaults of tie Devil. For it enhances
and strengthens the soul, just as acedia reduces it and makes
it feeble. 7

Certainly if it is the case that it is the image of St. George
which our culture has been missing, it is necessary to begin to ask
just how we managed to lose its dynamic power and how in turn
we might begin to recapture it. Might it be possible that the justi-
fiable zeal of Reformation leaders to eliminate the idolatry of
saints has somehow backfired? that the Reformers may have
failed to liberate the images which had motivated the actions of
early saints and instead only succeeded in making possible a
more shallow worship of celebrity gods, the idolatry of sport he-

From Band to Bonhoeffer 105

roes and movie stars, the cults of Superman, Batman, and the
robot Eighth Man? Is it possible that all of the well-intentioned
efforts to clean up children's literature has somehow unwittingly
resulted in more harm than good? Lewis Mumford has already
pointed out that we may have fooled ourselves

when we thought that any antiseptic efforts of ours to keep
the germs of fantasy from incubating, could banish the
child's sense of the mysterious, the inscrutable, the terrible,
the overwhelming. In repressing this life of fantasy and
subordinating it to our own practical interests, we perhaps
made it take more devious forms, or at least gave the de-
monic a free hand without conjuring up any angelic powers
to fight on the other side. We did not get rid of the dragon;
we only banished St. George. 8

Regardless of the various reasons which might ultimately be as-
signed for the explanation of the loss of the St. George imagery,
it is important to recognize that its power had resulted from the
blending of the courageous action of a specific historic person
with the dynamic imagery of an already existing myth. As such, it
was then able to capture the imagination of many people, not be-
cause they were interested in it as an intellectual abstraction of
some ethical principle, but because they could identify with the
person involved. This tradition of transferring the dynamic char-
acteristics of myth to the specific concrete events of history is an
essential part of biblical thought, evidenced in the shift out of the
early creation myths of Babylon and Egypt which were com-
pletely transcended by the Genesis concept of God's sovereignty,
as well as the various accounts about David and Goliath, Daniel
with Bel and the dragon, and even the amazing story of Shadrach,
Meshach, and Abednego.

It appears that there is a constant tendency in man's nature
which results in a flight from reality into fantasy, a retreat into
the timeless myths of superhuman heroes who are able to con-
quer varying symbols of evil. The progression therefore from the
shabby reality of the actual secret agent to that of the fantastic ex-
ploits in the Bond movies and their derivations might be expected
to result in the even more unrealistic figures of Superman and
Batman.

106 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

The test comes consequently when these extremes must be re-
directed back into reality and the daily problems of normal life.
In each of many artistic attempts to depict the legend of St.
George we can see how it was brought up-to-date within con-
temporary situations. As various artists projected their own con-
ditions into the story we can find St. George depicted in different
ways: as a noble Roman youth with classical beauty and strength,
or as a valiant knight clad in an amazing assortment of clothes
and armor and with the faces of different patrons who had com-
missioned specific works. By perceiving Fleming's representation
of secret agent 007 as a contemporaneous St. George, we can ac-
cept his premise as far as bringing the image up-to-date. The most
important factors are the dynamics of the action involved, not the
clothes or the gadgets. It was just as anachronistic for the fourth-
century martyr to be portrayed in the heavy armor of a fifteenth-
century knight upon a white horse as it is for Fleming to have de-
scribed him driving a fast car in a business suit.

By investigating the dynamics involved in images, we can begin to
appreciate why it is inadequate to present an image of St. George
alone. An image in itself can have great power. It can evoke ac-
tion on both conscious and unconscious levels. Men may seek to
imitate a hero figure by the unconscious mimicry of some ideal
model, or they may deliberately undertake to act out a role. A
little girl playing with her dolls illustrates the former, Don Qui-
xote the latter. Neither way in itself is adequate, for the image then
becomes either an icon or an idol. The factor of insight is missing,
that fusing together of conscious understanding with emotional
involvement, which produces commitment, will, courage, and ac-
tion growing out of integrity. Fleming reflected some understand-
ing of these dynamics, when he referred to Bond's "playing Red
Indians" in the beginning of Casino Royale and when he stated at
the conclusion of Diamonds Are Forever, "It reads better than it
lives."

James Bond therefore in the role of secret agent 007 is not ade-
quate to represent the image of St. George, not only because the
movie version of his adventures has drifted so far away from
Fleming's material, but also because these stories as fiction re-

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 107

main within the realm of myth or fantasy. In Marshall McLuhan's
terms, Bond is a "hot image" and we need a "cool" one which is
able to indicate commitment and complete involvement in depth.
What we need is not the James Bond who was Fleming's original
hero figure a St. George in secret agent's clothing, nor the sec-
ond James Bond who captured the attention of the mass audience,
but a real-life figure in whom we might trace out the underlying
dynamics of the image of St. George within an authentic situation
in history.

In searching for such a person, we do not have to go very far,
for there already is a man whose life and faith has succeeded in
capturing the attention of a great many people. His story, which is
fact, not fantasy, begins within our own century.

In July 1939, less than two months before the actual outbreak
of World War II, a young German minister did a very peculiar
thing to the distress of many of his friends and colleagues. Only a.
few weeks after his arrival in the United States for a speaking
tour which they had arranged for his safety, he returned to
Germany to face almost certain danger if he continued in his
steadfast opposition to the Nazi regime.

At the time his action was relatively unknown outside of a
small circle of international leaders in the ecumenical church
movement and other theologians who had hoped that his life
might be spared for the work of the church after the war. How-
ever, the letter which he wrote to Reinhold Niebuhr reveals
Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own clear recognition of the necessity of
acting within the immediate situation. In it he admits that he has
made a mistake in coming to America:

I must live through this difficult period of our national his-
tory with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no
right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in
Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time
with my people

Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of
either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Chris-
tian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their
nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which

108 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make that
choice in security. 9

Although this letter may appear to indicate a turning point
within Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life and ministry, it actually is on a
direct line which could be drawn between his earliest theological
papers and his ultimate execution in a concentration camp only
weeks before the collapse of the Nazi regime.

The story of his life is one which Reinhold Niebuhr felt well
worth recording in an article entitled "The Death of a Martyr" be-
cause "it belongs to the modern acts of the Apostles." 10 John
Godsey has pointed out that Bonhoeffer was the "sort of person
who, by his very demeanor, stood out in a crowd. There was a
certain aura about this powerfully built man with aristocratic fea-
tures and gentle eyes, which attracted people to him." 11 Martin
E. Marty writes that only European theologians Barth, Brunner,
and Bultmann and the two Niebuhrs and Tillich in America have
been "more studied, invoked and analyzed than Bonhoeffer in the
past quarter-century" (which means by really stretching a point
we might term Bonhoeffer the 007 agent in theology!). There is
little doubt that his life was marked not only by rigorous scholar-
ship of merit and promise but also by a very clear application of
Christian insight to the extremely precarious political situation in
Germany during Hitler's rise to power and the outbreak of war.
As a young minister he had presented a firm unequivocal opposi-
tion to Nazi policies from the very beginning. Only two days after
Hitler's assumption of public office in 1933, Bonhoeffer gave a
radio address which was actually cut off the air because officials
recognized that he was making subversive indictments of the
Fiihrer principle by calling it a form of idolatry. From that time
on, one by one the conventional channels for Christian witness
were gradually closed to him. He was barred from teaching when
he was thirty; from preaching at thirty-four; from publishing writ-
ten material at thirty-five; and imprisoned at thirty-seven. Yet, as
his close friend Eberhard Bethge points out, "each time this nar-
rowing circle came closer, his acting and thinking gained power
and stretched into new dimensions. When he was silenced for good
at thirty-nine, he began to speak more loudly than ever before. 12

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 109

In Bonhoeffer a strong Christian faith was confirmed by equally
courageous action, yet constantly mediated by a warmth and con-
cern for others. The witness which he gave not only in words but
with his life has served to capture the imagination of both pro-
fessional theologians and laymen. The fragmentary notes which he
was able to smuggle out of prison to his family and friends are
serving as a springboard for a whole new generation of theolo-
gians who are attempting to speak to the needs of what Bon-
hoeffer had termed the "world come of age."

There are several perspectives from which Bonhoeffer's life
and writings may be viewed. The first approach is generally that
of those who currently see him at the center of the intellectual
labyrinth exposed by the "honest to God" movement. Martin E.
Marty has pointed out that Bonhoeffer's broad appeal in this cat-
egory cuts across many lines: "East and West, Protestant and
Catholic, Liberal and Conservative, clergyman and layman, the-
ologian and activist, Calvinist and Lutheran, across the ecumeni-
cal spectrum he has stood as a symbol," an appeal which goes
beyond other reasons because Marty feels that Bonhoeffer "em-
pathized with the newer kind of Christian believer and thinker,
the dislocated, displaced inhabitant of a secular world." 13 It is
this perspective which has been stimulated by Bonhoeffer's words,
intrigued by such phrases as "cheap grace," the "world come of
age," and the "non-religious interpretation of Biblical terminol-
ogy," and therefore compelled to examine his writings for fheir
relevance to current theology.

Yet Eberhard Bethge, the man who has known Bonhoeffer's
most provocative writings best (Ethics and Letters and Papers
from Prison) because he preserved and edited them for publica-
tion, might suggest a second approach. When asked which he con-
sidered more important, Bonhoeffefs life or his theology, Bethge
replied, "Ah, that is a very interesting point I think the two were
closely connected, but I, since I am not a theologian, would say
his life." 14

It is within this perspective that we would point directly to the
obvious moral and physical courage which Bonhoeffer displayed
in joining the resistance movement against Hitler. In The Rise

110 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer has indicated how
the vast majority of Protestant clergymen had followed orders to
swear personal allegiance to the Fiihrer, thus committing them-
selves both legally and morally to obey his commands. Just as the
vast majority of German people had lightly given up their politi-
cal, cultural, and economic freedom, most were wiUing to sacri-
fice their freedom of worship as well. As one of the members of
the resistance group, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, observed, tbe
"non-Nazis were almost worse than the Nazis. Their lack of back-
bone caused us more trouble than the wanton brutality of the
Nazis. Many who had started as adversaries of National Socialism
believed that, by swallowing successive doses of the new creed,
they might escape the worst." 15

As we have seen, Bonhoeffer had spoken out directly against
the Fiihrer principle from the beginning. He had also condemned
the Aryan clause in which ministers of Jewish descent were for-
bidden to serve in the state church. Rather than serve in a Ger-
man church under growing Nazi domination, in 1933 Bonhoeffer
went to London where he ministered to Germans living there.
At this time he had made the important contacts with such church
leaders as Bishop G. K. A. Bell, the Anglican bishop of Chicester,
through whom the newly organized Confessing Church in Ger-
many could communicate with other Christians around the world.
Although at one time Bonhoeffer had wanted to go to India to
study Gandhi's principles of nonviolence, he soon realized the
impossibility of retreating into pacifism and instead returned to
Germany at the request of the Confessing Church in 1935 in order
to direct the activities of several illegal underground seminaries.
After the last of these groups had been disbanded by the Nazis
in 1940, he then began his activities within the resistance group.
Traveling under the cover of his employment as a civilian in the
Military Intelligence Service, he was able to make several secret
trips to Switzerland and Sweden in order to inform British church
officials about resistance plans and to request their aid in con-
tacting the Allied governments.

Once Bonhoeffer had become involved in what he had termed
the "great masquerade of evil" in Germany, he explained his de-

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 111

cision simply, "It is not only my task to look after the victims of
madmen who drive a motorcar in a crowded street, but to do all in
my power to stop their driving at all." 16 When the small group of
conspirators was depressed in 1942 and inclined to postpone
action, he revived their spirits by stating, "If we claim to be
Christians, there is no room for expediency. Hitler is the Anti-
christ. Therefore we must go on with our work and eliminate
him whether he be successful or not." 17

It is important to note, however, that even though his writings
in his incompleted book on ethics reveal that he had already
worked out the theological basis for his action, his decision was
evidently a costly one. Bishop Bell reported that during their
secret meeting in Sweden, Bonhoeffer was "obviously distressed
in his mind as to the lengths to which he had been driven by force
of circumstances in the plot for the elimination of Hitler." Al-
though he was looking forward to an immediate coup d'etat,
Bonhoeffer had said, "There must be punishment by God. We
should not be worthy of such a solution. We do not want to es-
cape repentance. Our action must be understood as an act of
repentance." 18

In addition to these reports, there is evidence from other men,
who were unacquainted with his writings, which would point to
Bonhoeffer's life as having represented a more signficant witness
to his Christian faith. Although most of those who had been in
prison with him were executed also, there is written testimony
from two survivors, Fabian von Schlabrendorff and Captain S.
Payne Best.

Schlabrendorff had been a member of the same small resistance
group with Bonhoeffer and had stated that whoever had joined
the group "had to realize that his life was doomed. A man's moral
value begins only when he is prepared to sacrifice his life for his
convictions." 19 It was he who had planted what turned out to be
an unsuccessful time bomb on Hitler's airplane and then had had
to recover it before its discovery. Although he had known that
Bonhoeffer had been able to conceal their activities from the
Gestapo when he was arrested in 1943, Schlabrendorff admitted
Ms own shock when he saw Bonhoeffer in prison later on after

112 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

his own arrest: "But one glance at his upright figure and into his
eyes, radiating serenity and composure, assured me that the dan-
gerous instant of recognition had passed without disturbing his
habitual self-control." During the cold showers which they man-
aged to take together, Bonhoeffer was later able to reveal to him
how the Gestapo proceedings had been sheer blackmail:

Outwardly he showed no emotion. He was always in good
spirits, and invariably kind and considerate to everyone
so much so that, to my surprise, even his guards soon fell
under his spell. In our relationship it was always he who re-
mained hopeful, while I sometimes suffered from depression.
He never tired of repeating that only that fight is lost in which
you admit defeat. How often did he smuggle a scrap of
paper into my hands on which he had written words of
comfort and faith from the Bible. 20

Captain Best, on the other hand, had never known Bonhoeffer
before they met at Buchenwald in the prison camp. He had been a
British intelligence officer, who had been kidnapped in neutral
Holland by Gestapo agents and taken into Germany by force.
When he reported his impressions during their last few days to-
gether, he contrasted Bonhoeffer with another member of the
resistance group. The one, a militant churchman with the rank of
a general, seemed "inclined to expect unquestioning obedience
to his religious opinions," while Bonhoeffer was "all humility and
sweetness":

He always seemed to me to diffuse an atmosphere of hap-
piness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and of deep
gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive. ... He was one
of the very few men that I have ever met to whom his God
was real and ever close to him. 21

In describing the small worship service which Bonhoeffer had
held for the prisoners on Sunday, April 8, 1945, Best said that he
had spoken to them "in a manner which reached the hearts of all,
finding just the right words to express the spirit of our imprison-
ment and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought.*'
Immediately after the last prayer Bonhoeffer was taken away by
two guards, but before he left he had taken Best aside and said,
"This is the end. For me the beginning of life!"

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 1 13

With these dramatic testimonies to Ms faith and courage, it
would be very tempting merely to draw the obvious analogies
between Dietrich Bonhoeffer and St. George. Just as the early
Christian martyr had refused to worship the pagan gods at the
emperor's command, Bonhoeffer refused to bow to the political
expediency of his time. Bishop Bell had pointed out that Bon-
hoeffer was "one of the first as well as one of the bravest witnesses
against idolatry. He understood what he chose when he chose re-
sistance. ... He was crystal clear in his convictions; and young as
he was, and humble-minded as he was, he saw the truth, and
spoke it with a complete absence of fear." 22

However, we would lose the opportunity to understand the
dynamics involved in the image of St. George if we were to focus
separately upon either Bonhoeffer's writings or his activities. Al-
though what he wrote and did are significant, they are the fruits of
his faith and not the faith itself. Why he wrote and acted as he
did is more important, because of his emphasis upon the whole
man (the biblical view of anthropos teleios) and not the religious
man (homo religiosus) . Although he had observed himself that
man was once again living in a time when reality had been laid
bare, when once more there were villains and saints not hidden
from public view, he had rejected completely the idea that Christ
was calling men to be either heroes or saints: "To be a Christian
does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate
some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, a penitent, or a
saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a
Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in
the life of the world." 23

By looking at both Bonhoeffer's life and his writings, we begin
to get some idea of the interaction which went on between them,
giving strength and vitality to his final words. Tillich once wrote
that all theological statements should be made with risk and pas-
sion, but these feelings rarely come across on the printed page.
As we read the last letters and papers which Bonhoeffer wrote in
prison, however, theology begins to come alive in a special way
and we begin to see what it really may mean to be a Christian in
the twentieth century.

114 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

Although in his early works Bonhoeffer had presented very
carefully prepared theological papers for the academic commun-
ity, in his last writings we are given an opportunity to share in the
process as he actually lives and works through his theology. We
share in his loneliness for his family and friends especially at hol-
iday time, in his desire to keep them from worrying over him, and
in his affirmation that "people are more important in life than
anything else." We participate in his concern for the terror of the
young prisoners locked in their cells or lying on the floor in some
insecure shelter during the recurrent nightly air-raids. We ap-
preciate his attempts to maintain morale and his impatience with
the sniveling propagandist and others who cannot contain their
terror. Then we face with him his own admission of times of de-
spair and fear, when he confesses to Bethge that everything in
prison was really "too awful for words," and when he realizes
that he has been putting on a theatrical show of being a "con-
tented, cheerful, easy-going fellow."

But, more significantly, we begin to wrestle with the questions
with which he began struggling: What is Christianity, and what is
Christ for us today? How can Christ become the Lord even of
those with no religion? What is a religionless Christianity? How
do we speak of God without religion? How can we claim for
Christ a world which has come of age?

These questions may be difficult indeed but, as Bethge has
written, Bonhoeffer was never the "comfortable contemporary"
or a "convenient analyst who addressed people from an easy
chair." In addition, we may not consider his answers as conclusive,
but only indicative of the direction he was taking. He admitted
that they had come only at the end of the particular path he had
traveled. Of primary importance, however, is the fact that he
repeatedly insisted on speaking of God "not on the borders of
life but at its centre" and rejected the use of God as either a work-
ing hypothesis or a deus ex machina who could be called on only
at the end of human resources and perception:

God cannot be used as a stop-gap. We must not wait until
we are at the end of our tether: he must be found at the cen-
tre of life: in life, and not only in death; in activity, and not

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 1 15

only in sin. The ground for this lies in the revelation of God
in Christ. Christ is the centre of life, and in no sense did he
come to answer our unsolved problems. 24
Because of his faith that Christ takes hold of a man in the cen-
ter of his life, Bonhoeffer offers us a deeper understanding
of what it means for a modern St. George to face the problem
of accidie. In his writings it is very clear that he knew that a man
does not conquer this temptation by playing the role of a saint,
but only through faith in the word of God. This problem was not
just an abstract concern for him, however, but rather one of deep
personal involvement In the first letter which he was able to
smuggle out to Bethge seven months after his imprisonment, he
had written:

You are the only person in the world who knows how often
I have nearly given way to accidie, tristitia, with all its dam-
aging effects on the soul. I feared at the time [i.e. of his
arrest] that you must be worrying about me on that ac-
count. But I told myself from the beginning that I wasn't
going to oblige either the devil or man they would just
have to lump it and I shall always stick to my deter-
mination. 25

The faith by which Bonhoeffer was able to resist this tempta-
tion of accidie was of necessity grounded in his own clear under-
standing of its nature. Many years earlier in a series of talks
about various forms of temptation he had explained that in ac-
cidie the "grace and promise of God are attacked and put to the
test. In this way Satan robs the believer of all joy in the Word of
God, all experience of the good God" It is that form of despair
about one's own personal guilt and of doubt in God's forgiveness,
in which man's spirit rebels against the word of God, in which
man demands an experience, proof of the grace of God. In ac-
cidie Bonhoeffer saw that man was "thrust by Satan into the high-
est temptation of Christ on the cross, as he cried: 'My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me?' " 2C The weapon by which the
Christian may conquer accidie therefore is a fresh understanding
of the word of God itself, that in Christ's victory man has been
called out of sin into a new life based on freedom and responsi-
bility.

116 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

For Bonhoeffer there could be only one reality: the life into
which God had called man through Jesus Christ. In his book on
ethics he had proclaimed, " 'Ecce homo! 9 Behold the man! In
Him the world was reconciled with God." In the really lived
love of God in Jesus Christ he saw that the concrete message had
been revealed once and for all, that the real world had been made
the arena for man's activities, and that there could no longer be
two separate spheres of life into which the sacred and secular
could be divided. "But the whole reality of the world is already
drawn in into Christ and bound together in Him, and the move-
ment of history consists solely in the divergence and convergence
in relation to this centre." 27

One of the most persistent motifs of Bonhoeffer's theology,
therefore, both formal and informal, was his emphasis upon "this-
worldliness." In The Cost of Discipleship he discussed the impli-
cations of Luther's concept of grace in correlation to obedience:

Luther's return from the cloister to the world was the worst
blow the world had suffered since the days of early Chris-
tianity. The renunciation he made when he became a monk
was child's play when he returned to the world. Now came
the frontal assault. The only way to follow Jesus was by
living in the world. 28

Although Bonhoeffer places a consistent emphasis upon worldli-
ness, it is important to note that he never meant a shallow world-
liness based upon "cheap grace." He believed that the cost of
making grace available to all without presenting a call to follow
Jesus in the narrow way had resulted in the collapse of the or-
ganized church in Germany and that the word of "cheap grace"
had been the "ruin of more Christians than any commandments
of works." Discipleship within the world is not prescribed ahead
of time. God did not confront the world with ideals and programs
or by conscience, duty, responsibility, and virtue, but rather with
his perfect love. Consequently the Christian must discard these
rusty swords and instead seek the daily "conformation" with
Christ as the Incarnate, Crucified, and Risen One: to be real
man, to be sinner, and to be a new man before God. Biblical
faith includes both the Old Testament understanding of a his-

From Bond to Bonhoeffer 1 17

torical redemption (redemption this side of death) and the Chris-
tian hope which "sends a man back to his life on earth in a wholly
new way which is even more sharply defined than it is in the Old
Testament." 29

In his concept of "this-worldliness" Bonhoeffer recognized that
men would find themselves in a new relationship of maturity
before God which might entail a feeling of "forsakenness." He
suggested however that God "has been teaching us that we must
live as men who can get along very well without him. The God
who is with us is the God who forsakes us." For Bonhoeffer, the
experience of the absence of God would never be the occasion
to succumb to accidie or to proclaim that God is dead. For him,
the absent God is the "beyond" who is in the midst of our life. As
an antidote for a syncopated society, he would point out that in
the polyphony of life, God is the cantus firmus to which the other
melodies of life provide the counterpoint For a long time Bon-
hoeffer said he had thought that he might acquire faith by trying
to live a holy life, but later he wrote that he had discovered that
it was "only by living completely in this world that one learns to
believe."

One must abandon every attempt to make something of
oneself, whether it be a saint, a converted sinner, a church-
man (the priestly type, so-called!), a righteous man or an un-
righteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. This is what I
mean by worldliness taking life in one's stride, with all its
duties and problems, its successes and failures, its experi-
ences and helplessness. It is in such a life that we throw
ourselves utterly in the arms of God and participate in his
sufferings in the world and watch with Christ in Gethsem-
ane. That is faith, that is metanoia, and that is what makes
a man and a Christian (cf. Jeremiah 45). How can success
make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we parti-
cipate in the sufferings of God by living in the world? 30

Because God has shown his love not for an ideal world but for
the real world, Bonhoeffer stated that man may no longer worship
the world nor flee from it into a religion based upon personal
pietism or abstract metaphysics. Because God has shown his love
not for ideal men but for real men, men may no longer set then*-

118 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

selves up as judges over each other or devise ethical systems
based upon abstract principles. Because Christ has affirmed all
reality, man has been called out of sin into life under the Lord-
ship of Christ as the "man for others," the man in whom we are set
free for genuine responsibility. In explaining his concept of dep-
utyship in his book on ethics, Bonhoeffer brings a completely
theological perspective to bear upon the whole question of the
self as agent. He pointed out that "not the individual in isola-
tion but the responsible man is the subject, the agent, with whom
ethical reflexion must concern itself. ... No man can altogether
escape responsibility, and this means that no man can avoid dep-
utyship." 31 Bonhoeffer saw Jesus Christ as the origin, essence,
and goal of all responsible life and believed that the responsible
man is one who commits all of his action into the hands of God
and lives by God's grace and favor.

Because he had recognized that the time was over when "men
could be told everything by means of words," Bonhoeffer knew
that it would not be abstract argument, but rather concrete ex-
ample which would continue to give the words of the church em-
phasis and power. In his life therefore he has given us this wit-
ness and provided our generation with a concrete example of the
image of St. George, pointing the way from religion into respon-
sibility and from apathy into action which is centered always in
Christ as the "man for others."

NOTES

001 INTRODUCTION: "SLUG FT APATHY!"

1. A. M. Rosenthal, "Study of the Sickness Called Apathy," New York
Times Magazine (May 3, 1964), p. 24.

2. William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming." Reprinted with permission
of the publisher from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF W. B. YEATS.
Copyright 1924 The Macmillan Company, copyright renewed 1952 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats.

3. W. H. Auden, "After Christmas," ibid., p. 468.

4. Harrison Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation (New York: Fawcett
World Library, Crest Book d775, 1958), p. 167.

5. Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton,
1964), p. 227.

6. Quoted by Malcolm Muggeridge, Esquire, Vol. 62 (December 1964), p.
36.

002 "THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM"

1. Cf. the following books about Ian Fleming and James Bond:
Kingsley Amis, The James Bond Dossier (New York: New American
Library, 1965).

Sheldon Lane, ed., For Bond Lovers Only (New York: Dell Publishing

Co., Dell 2672, 1965).

O. F. Snelling, 007 James Bond: A Report (New York: New American

Library, Signet Book D2652, 1965).

Lt. Col. William Tanner, The Book of Bond (New York: The Viking

Press, 1965).

Henry A. Zeigner, Ian Fleming: A Biography (New York: Duell, Sloan

& Pearce, 1965).

2. Cf. the following references:

*The Bond Phenomenon," Newsweek, Vol. 65 (April 19, 1965), pp. 95-

96.

Russell Baker, "Observer: James Bungler, Mass Hero," The New York

Times (April 15, 1965), p. 32.

Jacques Barzun, "Meditations on the Literature of Spying," American

Scholar, Vol. 34, (Spring 1965), pp. 167-178.

Robert Harling, "The Ian Flemings," Vogue, Vol. 142 (September 1,

1965), p. 222.

3. Robert L. Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts (Richmond: John
Knox Press, 1965).

4. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter," in Major American Writers,
eds. Howard Mumford Jones and Ernest E. Leisy (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1945), pp. 759-760.

5. Quotations from the James Bond series used in this book are from the
Signet paperback editions published by the New American Library of

119

120 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

World Literature, Inc., New York, except those from The Man -with the
Golden Gun which are from the hard cover edition of the same pub-
lisher. All subsequent quotations will be indicated by the appropriate
abbreviation from the following key (copyright date follows title) :

CR Casino Roy ale (1953)
LLD Live and Let Die (1954)
M Moonraker (1955)
DF Diamonds Are Forever (1956)
FR From Russia with Love (1957)
DN Doctor No (1958)
G Goldfinger (1959)
FY For Your Eyes Only (1959, 1960)
T Thunderball (1961)
TS The Spy Who Loved Me (1962)
SS On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963)
YOL You Only Live Twice (1964)
GG The Man -with the Golden Gun (1965)

6. The Seven Deadly Sins 9 foreword by Ian Fleming (New York: William
Morrow, 1962), p. ix.

7. Quoted in "Bond's Creator," New Yorker, VoL 38 (April 21, 1962), pp,

32-34.

003 DOCTOR NO REVISITED

1. Paul Johnson, "Sex, Snobbery and Sadism," New Statesman, Vol. 55
(April 5, 1958), p. 430.

2. John Canaday, *The Quiet Necromancer," New York Times (December
19, 1965), p. X 17.

3. Quoted in Playboy, Vol. 11 (December 1964), p. 100.

4. Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, Act H, Scene L

5. Richard the Third, Act V, Scene DOE.

6. Henry the Fifth, Act HI, Scene L

7. First Part of King Henry the Sixth, Act IV, Scene I.

8. Christina Hole, Saints in Folklore (New York: M. Barrows, 1965),
p. 32.

9. Quoted in For Bond Lovers Only, p. 19.

004 THE HOT IMAGE IN THE COLD WORLD

1. C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, tr. R. F. C. Hull (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p. 303.

2. Martin E. Buber, The Eclipse of God (New York: Harper Torchbook
Edition TB12, 1957), p. 119.

3. Cf. Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image (Ann Arbor Paperbacks, The Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1963). Also Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image
(New York: Harper & Row, Colophon Edition, 1964).

4. Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (New York: Schocken Books SB105,
1965), p. 53.

5. As reported by Eric R. Wolf, Anthropology (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964), p. 78.

Notes 121

6. Herbert Read, The Forms of Things Unknown (New York: World Pub-
lishing Co., Meridian Book M168, 1963), p. 101.

7. Norman Shrapnel, "The Literature of Violence and Pursuit," Time*
Literary Supplement (June 23, 1961), p. 387.

8. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., quoted in the New York Times (November
25, 1965), p. 8.

9. Conrad Knickerbocker, "The Spies Who Come in from Next Door,"
Life, Vol. 58 (April 30, 1965), p. 13.

10. Cf . discussion by Joseph Henderson, "Ancient Myths and Modern Man,"
in Man and His Symbols, eds. Jung and von Franz (Garden City:
Doubleday & Company Inc., 1964), especially pp. 112-113.

11. "Secret Agent Man," written by P. F. Sloan and Steve Barri, published
by Trousdale Music Publishers, Inc., Copyright 1965. Used by permis-
sion.

12. Cf. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden
City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959). Also Peter Berger, The Pre-
carious Vision (Doubleday & Company Inc., 1961).

13. John Le Carr6, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., 1965), pp. 129-130.

14. Ibid., p. 150.

15. Donald Hamilton, The Devastators (Greenwich: Fawcett Publications,
Inc., 1965), p. 165.

16. Adam Hall, The Quiller Memorandum (New York: Pyramid Books,
1965), pp. 115-116.

17. Hamilton, op. cit., p. 178.

18. Le Carre, op. cit., p. 150.

19. Hamilton, op. cit., p. 147.

20. Hall, op. cit., p. 118.

21. S0ren Kierkegaard, in Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard, Vol. n (New York:
Harper Torchbook TB90, 1962), p. 429.

22. Ernest Becker, The Revolution in Psychiatry (New York: The Free
Press of Glencoe, 1964), p. 205.

23. Enrique Vargas, "The Jet-Age Malady," Saturday Review (May 29,
1965), p. 18,

24. Ibid., p. 19.

25. Allan Wheelis, The Quest for Identity (New York: W. W. Norton,
1958), p. 72.

26. Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning (New York: Washington
Square Press, Inc., 1963), p. 121.

27. Cf . Joseph Goldbruner, Individuation (University of Notre Dame Press,
1964), especially chapter 12. Also Esther Harding, Journey Into Self
(New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1956).

28. Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner*s Sons,
1963), p. 17.

005 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BONDl

1. Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky," from Through the Looking Glass (New
York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 13.

2. Quoted in For Bond Lovers Only, p. 36.

3. Ian Fleming, The Diamond Smugglers (New York: Macmillan, Collier
Books Edition, 1964), p. 29

122 THE DEVIL WITH JAMES BOND!

4. Quoted in For Bond Lovers Only, p. 17.

5. E. V. Walter, "Mass Society: The Late Stages of an Idea," Social Re-
search, Vol. 31 (Winter 1964), pp. 391-400.

6. Wolf, op. cit., p. 12.

7. Ibid., p. 20.

8. Joseph Campbell, The Hero -with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: The
World Publishing Co., Meridian Book M22), p. 391

9. Stanley Romaine Hopper, "The Problem of Moral Isolation in Con-
temporary Literature," in Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature^
ed. Hopper (New York: Harper Torchbook TB21, 1957), p. 154.

10. Material concerning Asmodeus may be found in Maximilian J. Rudwin,
The Devil in Legend and Literature (Chicago: The Open Court Pub-
lishing Co., 1931).

11. Denis de Rougemont, The Devil's Share (Washington: Pantheon Books,
Bollingen Series, 1944), p. 18.

12. Ibid., p. 46.

13. Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan State College
Press, 1952), p. 243.

006 WHERE'S THE ACTION?

1. Arthur Miller, 'The Bored and the Violent," Harper's (November 1962),
p. 51.

2. Karl Menninger, The Vital Balance (New York: Viking, 1963), p. 378.

3. Norman Cousins, as quoted by Menninger, ibid., p. 375.

4. Robert Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe: Free
Press, 1949), p. 189.

5. Robert Maclver, The Ramparts We Guard (New York: Macmillan,
1950), p. 84.

6. James Robinson, The Problem of History in Mark (London: SCM Press
Ltd., 1962), p. 50.

7. Karl Barth, The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Church Dogmatics, Volume
IV, 2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1958), p. 378.

8. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. in (University of Chicago Press,
1963), pp. 231-237.

9. Harding, op. cit., pp. 283-284. See also Harvey Cox, God's Revolution
and Man's Responsibility (Valley Forge: The Judson Press, 1965), pp.
37-51; Josef Pieper, Leisure, the Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1952), pp. 38-45.

10. Morris West, Petrarch and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1963), pp. 200-213.

11. Karl A. Olsson, Seven Sins and Seven Virtues (New York: Harper &
Bros., 1959), pp. 34-40.

12. James A. Pike and Howard A. Johnson, Man in the Middle (Green-
wich: Seabury Press, 1956), p. 77.

13. Miller, op. cit., p. 56.

007 FROM BOND TO BONHOEFFER

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: Macmillan Paperback Edition,
1965), p. 68.

2. "MTIW nn rit n f 6

Notes 123

3. Ian Fleming, Thrilling Cities (New York: New American Library, Signet
Book P2694, 1964), pp. 77-78.

4. Ibid., p. 119.

5. Gabriel Vahanian, Wait Without Idols (New York: George Braziller,
1964), p. 243.

6. H. Richard Niebuhr, quoted in Vahanian, ibid., p. 52.

7. Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, modern English version by J. V.
Nicolson (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1934),
p. 594.

8. Lewis Mumford, Green Mansions (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947),
p. 65.

9. Quoted by Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Death of a Martyr," Christianity
and Crisis, Vol. V (June 25, 1945), p. 6.

10. Ibid.

11. John Godsey, The Theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Philadelphia: West-
minster Press, 1960), p. 13.

12. Eberhard Bethge, 'The Challenge of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Life and
Theology," The Chicago Theological Seminary Register, Vol. LI (Feb-
ruary 1961).

13. Martin E. Marty, The Place of Bonhoeffer (New York: Association
Press, 1964), p. 14.

14. Quoted by Ved Mehta, *The New Theologians," New Yorker (Novem-
ber 27, 1965), p. 159.

15. Fabian von Schlabrendorff, They Almost Killed Hitler, as told to Gero
von Schulze-Gaevernitz, ed. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1947), p. 11.

16. Quoted by G. Leibholz in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
(New York: Macmillan Paperbacks Edition, 1963), p. 28.

17. Quoted by G. K. A. Bell in The Church and Humanity (London:
Longmans, Green & Co., 1946), p. 175.

18. Ibid., p. 172.

19. Schlabrendorff, op. cit. 9 p. 137.

20. Ibid., p. 138.

21. S. Payne Best, The Venlo Incident (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1951),
p. 180.

22. G. K. A. Bell, in The Cost of Discipleship, p. 7.

23. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York:
Macmillan Paperback Edition, 1962), pp. 222-223.

24. Ibid., p. 191.

25. Ibid., p. 84.

26. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Temptation (London: SCM Press Ltd., 1963), p.
44.

27. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p. 198.

28. Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship f p. 51.

29. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 205.

30. Ibid., pp. 226-227.

31. Bonhoeffer, Ethics, pp. 224-225.