By Jeffrey Susla, Nichols College

It was straight out of a Bond film. Upon arrival at Jacksonville, Florida’s Marriott hotel I was greeted by the sight of the three-story high yacht, Kismet, berthed on the St. John’s River (Florida’s longest). Apparently, Shahid Kahn, the owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, was in town. From the glass fronted hotel lobby one could see the black t shirted crew on its deck, and my thoughts ran to oceanic vessels appearing in the Bond novels, from Moonraker to Diamonds Are Forever (the source of this review’s title) to Thunderball. Being so close to such a symbol of ostentatious wealth was an omen of sorts for me, foreshadowing the depth and breadth of this year’s conference papers presented under the aegis of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s annual conference with the theme “Seen and Unseen”.

Once again, our co-chairs were Oliver Buckton, author of the recently published Counterfeit Spies (Rowman & Littlefield) and the ever-genial Matt Sherman. What follows are my recollections of the presentations listed in order of their reading. We were joined virtually by Shana Beth Mason and Dr. Lucas Townsend, both scholars of repute. I am responsible for any errors in this review. 

Kyle S. Bond, of Florida State University, is the author of “Death and Dynamicity in the Daniel Craig Era of James Bond: Technology, Embodiment, and the role of (In-)Visibility on ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Skyfall’, and ‘Spectre’. Basing his work on film theorist and scholar Brunella Tedesco-Barlocco, Bond connected the recent American zeitgeist “post-truth” occurrence to his inquiry of “what does the death of James Bond want?” Echoing Bennett and Woollacott, he sees Bond as “a reflective surface” rather than a mobile signifier. The Craig films serve to place James Bond in a “temporal paradigm shift” where Bond appears humanist, sacrificing his own blood in Tedesco-Barlocco’s phrase, as a paradigm for “incomplete heroism”. Kyle Bond concurs as he sees James Bond moving from this past manifestation to an “incomplete hero” because of our post truth age.

Curiously, but effectively, Bond connects “No Time to Die” with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening calling them both “realist” texts. He sees in Edna Pontellier’s death, Bond’s own in NTTD. I’ll leave it to others to determine if Craig’s death is suicidal, but Pontellier’s death has echoes in Tracy Di Vicenzo’s walk into the sea in OHMSS.

My issues with Kyle Bond’s presentation are that he focuses on Bond’s death without mentioning Craig’s own interests in ending his Bond tenure with the character’s demise. Kyle Bond does not name the screenwriters responsible for Bond’s final years, and surely, Barbara Broccoli merits scrutiny here, as she is the den mother of the franchise, as evidenced by her present battle with Amazon over Bond’s “content”. Furthermore, widely-read scholar that he is, Kyle Bond throws the kitchen sink at us referencing Shakespeare, James Baldwin, Wayne Booth, and Martin Heidegger amongst others, in a twelve-page paper, which is no mean feat. Not to appear to take a cheap shot, but the academic nature of the paper left me wondering what Kyle Bond “wants” from his audience. After all, the self-deprecating Fleming stated that he “was not in the Shakespeare stakes”.

Perhaps it was fate that led me to present a paper in the manner of Kyle S. Bond’s. Rather than rely on Tedesco-Barlocco’s work, my paper, “James Bond’s Anglo-Saxon License to Kill: A deep dive in the Beowulf/Bond connection” is based on Bernice Larson Webb’s scholarship, who in 1968 published an essay in the South Atlantic Quarterly, entitled “James Bond as Literary Descendant of Beowulf”. Webb compares the content of Beowulf as it relates to Fleming’s, The Man With the Golden Gun, with efficacy. My paper suggests that she errs in selecting TMWTGG as the foundation of her literary analysis. I argue that the penultimate novel in the Bond series, You Only Live Twice, is more apt. In keeping with the conference theme, I note that both stories feature hidden (unseen) location, and hidden characters (both Blofeld and the disguised Bond) along with waterside locations.

Shana Beth Mason concluded the first panel presentation with her, “The Most Invisible Villainess: Rosa Klebb”. London-based Mason is an arts and culture critic who has contributed to The International Journal of James Bond Studies. Surely, one of Fleming’s best villainesses, Mason calls Klebb “a detestable creature… not just taken away, but to be discarded, forgotten, and treated with the same level of ignominy that his own adversaries would have laid upon him.” In discussing Klebb, I note Mason’s use of the word “ignominy” which is how General Grubozaboyschikov signs off on James Bond’s death warrant. Mason offers a brief theatrical vita of Viennese-born Lotte Lenya, “her grace and elegance so often cited by her peers was purposefully crushed into nothingness to satisfy the conditions for the consummate Bond villain”. Mason adroitly connects the seen/unseen sexual natures of Klebb/Lenya and I learned that during the filming of “From Russia With Love”, Lenya eschewed wearing a “fat suit” insisting on her capability to “play the cello shaped ‘toad-like ‘literary Klebb simply by her theatrical skill alone. Mason neglects commentary on Klebb’s past, as a possible mistress of Andreas[sic] Nin (superbly analyzed in Javier Maria’s “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy). Repellent sexuality aside, I came away from Mason’s paper reminded of Kronsteen’s “description of Klebb as a “Neuter” and not the victim of the “unsightly repulsiveness in the eyes of the worldly, cosmopolitan post-war snob that was Ian Fleming.”

Fate appeared again concerning the subject of the conference co-chair’s selection of Moonraker as their focus. Oliver Buckton’s presentation of “Some Form of Prophetic Power:” The Invisible Influence of Peter Fleming’s The Sixth Column on Ian Fleming’s Moonraker reports on the template “for a novel of treason and espionage set in the homeland” which the elder Fleming created for Ian, going so far as to dedicate the novel to his younger brother, surely an act of inspiring Ian to write the “spy story to end all spy stories”. Buckton’s detailing of the plot of The Sixth Column and its connection to Moonraker is fascinating, given the political environment in 1951 England. Peter Fleming’s Paul Osney uses his writing and broadcasting fame to create Plan D, a sinister plot to “undermine the balance of nature in the United Kingdom”. Buckton deftly parallels Hugo Drax’s rise to “a knighthood and celebrity status” in a country desperate to be at the “top table” of nuclear powers, while reflecting the England that he [Fleming] hated, “rife with class snobbery and insular blindness towards the hostile intentions of its neighbors”. After reading his paper, perhaps the highest compliment that I can give Professor Buckton is that while The Sixth Column has been long out of print, I located a copy of Fleming’s book and ordered it online. 

Matt Sherman followed Oliver Buckton’s paper by sharing his “Heil High, to the Stratosphere: Moonraker”. Sherman, in a nod to Fleming’s introduction to The Seven Deadly Sins, notes the comparisons between Drax and Bond in their display of malice, and emphasizes the deadlier sin of self-righteousness in Drax’s Blades Club behavior. Sherman, an expert on Fleming’s food and gamesmanship in the Bond novels, correctly points out that the self-righteous Bond is forced to cheat to defeat Drax, therein lowering himself to Drax’s own level. Sherman notes that Bond’s attitude toward his assignment has him dangerously ignoring investigating Drax’s staff and making a pass at engaged Gala Brand while on their Channel swim shows his abundance of pride. Sherman notes the novel’s word play, hinting that Gala’s given name, Galatea, means “she who is milk white “suitably named for the subsequent Cliff explosion when both Bond and Brand are covered in chalk dust”. And we are told Drax is derived from the German drachen, meaning dragon. Regarding moonraker, as Oliver Buckton has noted, the name “was a demonym for residents of Wiltshire”. Furthermore, Sherman proposes that Drax was modeled after Adolf Hitler. While his comparisons are numerous, Sherman writes:

Drax, like Hitler, is a Nazi hawking and peddling gigantic

Lies to win populist acclaim, who wants to launch rockets on Britain

For rejecting him, who steals from, tortures and murders Jews, who is

Hospitalized while fighting for Germany, then arises blinded by

Self-righteousness, a man of visions, paranoia, delusion of grandeur

and persecution, who is also a bullying voice, a perspiring nail biter,

a megalomaniac grieving Germany’s wartime defeat, who speaks

as a native hero who was born in a different nation.

Sherman states that while Ian Fleming had his own heroes, Moonraker is a timely novel about the misplaced dangers of hero worship. Speaking editorially, I have written before in these pages of current political leaders who exhibit Hugo Drax’s “raving, devious, spiteful paranoiac” characteristics. Deadly sins indeed.

If brevity is the soul of wit, independent scholar Andrew Wright was unambiguous in his often humorous, “For Your Eyes Only: Between Ambiguity and Uncertainty in James Bond”. Having noted that his paper at the previous SAMLA conference was focused on the importance of seeing Bond’ in a custom-fitted tuxedo, and his paper argues the opposite, Wright notes that the growing field of James Bond studies “is such transparency remains as much a fantasy in the stories themselves, and that Bond is not some character re-imaging time and again.” Echoing Kyle S. Bond’s observation that Bond “reflects the anti-postmodern characterization to approach to protagonists and superheroes [Iron Man, Batman, etc.,] What is unambiguous in the recent Bond films is Bond’s sexual proclivities, as Wright argues that we know Bond’s character “well enough to be certain that he did not simply enjoy a kiss or undress a woman and then immediately jump into a cold shower instead.” While the bedroom is preferable, Bond is not unaccustomed to sex in the shower (Patricia Fearing in “Thunderball”, Séverine in “Skyfall”, not to mention consoling Vesper Lynd in “Casino Royale”
, or the freshly bathed Fiona Volpe in “Thunderball” or Andrea Anders in “The Man With the Golden Gun”). Speaking of bathrooms, Wright ventures into the scatological in his query,

Do you think James Bond (during his frequent hotel stays) defecates with the door open?” What Wright correctly notes in the Dalton-Craig era Bonds, is that the camera cuts away each time Bond is intimate with a woman (in the manner of Hays Code Hollywood).  To Wright, it is a certainty that Moneypenny and Bond have sex after the shaving episode in “Skyfall”. He goes so far to quote Katherine Angel’s, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again “All sex, in fact, involves play with power and relinquishing; with the ambiguous space between desire and uncertainty.” Regarding the unseen Bondian sex scenes, perhaps the paper would have been better titled: Not For Your Eyes Only.”

Concluding the august panel presentations, independent scholar and librarian, Frieda Toth, presented “Double Oh, Your Softy: Bond as Bleeding Heart Liberal, Even Before Woke Was a Thing”. Toth is a Fleming devotee, and her argument is that “Daniel Craig’s sensitive Bond is a return to his roots.” Toth clearly takes issue with M’s commentary on Bond in “Goldeneye”, that he is “a sexist misogynist dinosaur”, insisting that Bond acts honorably toward women in Casino Royale and OHMSS as novels where Bond even considers marriage. (Toth omits Bond’s thoughts on Tiffany Case in From Russia With Love). To Toth, “literary Bond is irresistible, not predatory” and the early films “are all the worse for the diametric opposite of the source material”. Fleming’s Bond never coerces a woman into sex (unlike Connery with his osteopath in “Thunderball” and Moore’s stacking Solitaire’s tarot deck in “Live and Let Die”. Toth, compares Bond’s dialogue in Casino Royale, From Russia With Love, and Doctor No, and in OHMSS to romance novel content:” He had been prepared to be careful about hurting her feelings/”I’ve fallen for her.”” My darling,” Won’t you tell me? Do you know that first morning I was coming back to ask you to marry me?” To quote Toth again, Bond here is being, “Very woke.”

Toth is at her best when discussing the unsuitability of casting Sean Connery vis-à-vis the literary Bond. Pulling no punches, she calls Connery a brute and far more misogynist than the character created in the 1950s. This is perhaps best evidenced by the interview Connery gave to Playboy where he discussed the appropriateness of physical abuse toward women. And speaking of abuse, Frieda Toth cited the online source, “Epic Rap Balles of History: James Bond versus Austin Powers” with which I was unfamiliar.

The post-conference bonhomie was celebrated around a cocktail table—well before the U.S. Surgeon General’s alcohol warning–and readers of this magazine, may have been pleased to note that their name was dropped. Furthermore, while the end credits of the Bond pictures (save for “Dr. No” have “James Bond Will Return” appear. I left the conference wondering if this was the last hurrah for the James Bond sections at SAMLA? Will the conference organizers create a Bond conference to end all Bond conferences? As it was my kismet to attend this SAMLA conference, I’ll eagerly set sail for next year’s gathering.