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November 25, 2006

NOW PAY ATTENTION, 007 FANS

We're certainly pleased with all the editorial attention the literary Bond is receiving these days but the editors at Salon - about whom we've always had our doubts - need a bit of help in the fact-checking department.

Even Chandler never got a plug from an American president. Yet, nearly 45 years ago, when asked why the bedroom lights in the White House were on so late, JFK (like James Bond, a naval commander in World War II) replied that he was "up late reading 'From Russia With Love.'" Fleming returned the compliment in 1965 when he had Bond take a copy of "Profiles in Courage" on an assignment.

Given that Fleming dropped dead of a massive heart attack on August 12, 1964, it's unlikely he sent Bond anywhere at all in 1965.

Posted at 02:48 PM |

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Comments

Ron

Not so much bad fact-checking as bad copy-editing: Man With the Golden Gun was indeed published in '65, after Fleming's death, and Bond does read Profiles during the book.

(Actually, while looking this up, I learned that Kingsley Amis worked on the manuscript after Fleming died, so maybe the reference was his doing...)

Posted by: Ron | November 25, 2006 at 04:05 PM

TEV

I'm inclined to agree (about the copy-editing part, not so much the Amis part), as the second page of the article notes Fleming's 1964 expiration ... Perhaps it's merely bad writing. Adding something like "in the posthumously published TMWTGG" might have done the trick.

Posted by: TEV | November 25, 2006 at 04:43 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

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