Ann Fleming, née
Charteris, was born into the aristocracy and married wealthy men. Photograph:
©The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's
An extraordinary stash of letters that shine a light on the tangled
relationship between the James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, and his wife, Ann,
from their intense and secret affair to the bitter end of their marriage, are
to appear at auction.
Sotheby’s is selling more than 160 letters between the couple,
written over 20 years. Gabriel Heaton, a specialist in books and manuscripts at
the auction house, said the letters in their scope and scale provided what
“must surely be an unmatchable record of the life of the author as his fortunes
changed”.
They also provide insight into the rise of
Bond. Heaton said it was
no coincidence that Fleming wrote his first Bond novel, Casino Royale, in the
year of his marriage.
Ian Fleming had numerous flings and affairs with other women. Photograph: ©The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive at Sotheby's
It was “both as an outlet for his libido and
imagination, and also in an attempt to make money for a woman who was used to
being unthinkingly rich”.
Ann Fleming, née Charteris, was born into the
aristocracy and married wealthy men. Her first husband was Shane O’Neill, the
3rd Baron O’Neill. After his death in military action in 1944, she married the
newspaper magnate Esmond Harmsworth, the 2nd Viscount Rothermere.
During both marriages she and Fleming were lovers, an intense relationship
that had sado-masochistic elements. “I long for you even if you whip me because
I love being hurt by you and kissed afterwards,” Ann once wrote to Fleming.
In 1948 Ann became pregnant with Fleming’s
child, a girl who was a month premature and lived only eight hours. The
collection includes a number of sad and gentle letters written by Fleming on
Gleneagles stationery shortly after he played golf with Rothermere, the
cuckolded husband.
In one letter he writes: “I have nothing to
say to comfort you. After all this travail and pain it is bitter. I can only
send you my arms and my love and all my prayers.”
Fleming had numerous flings and affairs with
other women and when the couple finally married in 1952 that was never likely
to stop.
Ann once wrote to him: “You mention ‘bad old
bachelor days’ – the only person you stopped sleeping with when they ceased was
me!”
A letter from Fleming written on British
Overseas Airways Corporation stationery reads: “In the present twilight, we are
hurting each other to an extent that makes life hardly bearable.”
Heaton said the letters were packed with
stories of high society, travel, love of nature and gossip.
“They are quite something, it has been a real treat,” he said.
“They are an extraordinary read because Ian Fleming is pretty much incapable of
writing a dull sentence.”
Fleming wrote all of the Bond novels at GoldenEye, his house in
Jamaica, a place visited by many of Ann’s remarkable circle of friends. The
artist Lucian Freud, for example, and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, with
whom she had a long affair.
There were also surprising visitors. “Truman
Capote has come to stay,” Fleming writes. “Can you imagine a more incongruous
playmate for me. On the heels of a telegram he came hustling and twittering
along with his tiny face crushed under a Russian Commissars’ uniform hat [...]
he had just arrived from Moscow.”
The letters consist of more than 500 typed and
handwritten pages, at least three written on endpapers torn from books. Two of
the letters from Ann are written on the back of a gin rummy card and a hospital
temperature chart.
They will be offered in Sotheby’s online
literature sale between 3 and 10 December and come with an estimate of
£200,000-300,000.
It was important to keep them together, said
Heaton. “They are much more than the sum of their parts, the correspondence as
a whole is far more substantial and interesting and revealing and exciting than
simply an accumulation of individual letters.”
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/11/extraordinary-letters-between-ian-fleming-and-wife-to-be-sold
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