British novelist William
Boyd, who wrote the James Bond continuation novel, Solo, tracked down what may
been the London addresses of Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent James Bond,
as well as the London address of John le Carre’s fictional spymaster George
Smiley, in a piece in the London Times Literary Supplement, TLS.
I am in London. In Chelsea to
be precise, at the entrance to Wellington Square off the King’s Road, where I
am being interviewed for the French radio station RTL – à distance sociale – about James Bond. The reason why we’re at Wellington Square
is because this is where James Bond lived. Obviously, James Bond is a fictional
character and didn’t actually live anywhere. However, it is strange how in the
case of some fictional characters a kind of reality begins to take over their
lives, as if they really did live and breathe, had an actual address and a
mortgage.
I
point out to the interviewer that, a few yards across the King’s Road from
where we’re standing, almost directly opposite, is the entrance to Bywater
Street. Believe it or not, I tell him, another famous fictional spy, John le
Carré’s George Smiley, lived in Bywater Street. This extraordinary coincidence
causes some excited consternation and we stop recording and cross the road. In
Bywater Street, we start recording again. “George Smiley lived here? Amazing.
What number?” the interviewer asks. Number 9, I say. You see what I mean.
I
suppose the most famous fictional abode for a character is Sherlock Holmes’s
221b, Baker Street. James Bond’s address and George Smiley’s have yet to
achieve the same legendary status, but give them time. When I came to write my
James Bond continuation novel, Solo (2013), I set myself the
task of re-reading all of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels in chronological order, pen
in hand, making notes, with the idea that all the texture and detail in the new
novel would be classic Bondiana, sourced in Fleming..
There is another significant
reason why Wellington Square might have proposed itself as a suitable address
for Bond. In the late 1940s and early 50s Fleming was the Foreign Manager for
the Sunday Times, a person of power and influence at the newspaper. During
this period, the chief book reviewer for the Sunday Times was Desmond
MacCarthy, a central member of the Bloomsbury Group. As it happened, MacCarthy
and his wife Molly lived in Wellington Square. They were legendary entertainers
and their home became a kind of salon. Cyril Connolly was one of MacCarthy’s
young protégés and a regular at the soirées – and, what’s more, Connolly and
Fleming were close friends. All three were Old Etonians, incidentally.
The circumstantial evidence
is compelling. It is highly probable that Fleming went to one or more of the
MacCarthys’ parties in Wellington Square, either through his own connections
with MacCarthy via the Sunday Times or as a friend of Connolly. MacCarthy died in 1952, the year
before Casino Royale was published, though it wasn’t until Moonraker, three years later, that Bond’s Chelsea flat received its
first mention.
…The MacCarthy house is to be
found in the eastern corner of Wellington Square. Bond’s flat, according to
Fleming, was on the ground floor and was described in From Russia, with Love (1957) as having “a long big-windowed sitting room”. The
ground-floor window of the MacCarthy house fits that description perfectly. One
other sliver of circumstantial evidence I would offer is that, in the same
novel, Bond’s sitting room is described as “book-lined”. Most readers wouldn’t
think of James Bond as an intellectual but books would certainly be the most
prominent aspect of the MacCarthy house’s decor. In fact, Fleming took pains to
stress Bond’s wide reading, despite the fact that Bond (Eton and Fettes) had no
tertiary education. Bond makes reference to many books and writers in the
novels: Eric Ambler, Lafcadio Hearn, John Milton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar
Allan Poe, Sheridan le Fanu and Rupert Brooke among others. Bond is a very
well-read spy.
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
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