After Dahl also Jan Fleming and who knows how many more in the future. Indeed, to mark the 70th anniversary of Casino Royale, in English and American bookstores from April every new edition will carry a trigger warning of this kind: «This book was written in a time where concepts and attitudes can be considered by modern readers considered offensive, they were commonplace. Numerous changes have been made to this edition, keeping the text closer to the original and to the time in which it takes place”. In other words, the adventures of secret agent 007 were written in dark times, in the Middle Ages the day before yesterday, and therefore had to supplemented with a work of correction and softening of at least some terms that might (and perhaps are) appear racist.
Jan Fleming had constructed a rather contradictory hero: indeed, according to his enemy friend John Le Carré, née David Cornwell, a real gangster, “a fascist, one who ignores international politics and would work for any country”, like himself said in a teenage interview with the BBC in 1966. Really? It must be said that the inventor of 007 was certainly inferior in writing to the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but above all despite an almost parallel biography, because both had frequented the same circles, including those of the secret services, the two represented a kind of antithesis in the 20th century Cold War. On the one hand, George Smiley, highly intelligent and tormented, a “moral” man; on the other James Bond, very smart and indifferent.
There is a suspicion that it bothered Le Carré physically too – the characters often become flesh-and-blood creatures. “I don’t love him,” he announced, “and I’m not even sure he qualifies as a spy. In fact, I think it’s a big mistake to classify it as spy literature». “In fact, it seems to me,” his prosecution continued, “that he behaves more like an international gangster who, they say, has a license to kill.” When the interview resumed years ago, Le Carré seemed to want to correct such harsh judgments a bit, admitting his point of view hadn’t changed, but perhaps on balance he would have been “much kinder”. A delightful understatement: His kindness was actually to remind people that there was, after all, “something neo-fascist and materialistic about the origins of James Bond”. One can’t help but think – he concluded his commentary on English radio – that he would have done the same for any other country as long as the women were always very beautiful and the martinis very dry».
Steps for the martinis. But is that already a good reason to correct it? Many must have thought of that, from the parts of the Jan Fleming Foundation that holds the rights, not without looking at the commercial potential, which has been dwindling for some time. It must be said that Fleming’s works have been reissued in Italy in a very elegant Adelphi guise, beginning with Casino Royale in 2012 – and then all the other novels each year – in a sumptuous editorial guise reminiscent of the original cover, and a splendid afterword by Matteo Codignola. And if we’ve all seen the 007 movies, maybe the lyrics came as a surprise to many. Because let’s face it, although John Fitzgerald Kennedy liked him, Fleming wrote pretty badly – and the excellent Massimo Bocchiola, who translated Casino Royale, dutifully refrained from improving it. The incipit is enough: «Smoke, sweat: at three o’clock in the morning it smells disgusting in a casino where you play hard. It will be the smell, the smoke or the sweat… The senses awaken and twist with disgust».
Twist the senses? As for the women, tomboy 007 is seduced by a still water called Vesper. We read that as they got down to business, he “slid his hands down Vesper’s rounded buttocks and gripped them tightly, squeezing the cores of their bodies together.” veins flowed back”. Perhaps the play is a nominee for the Bad Sex Award, a humorous English award for the worst sex scene in a work of literature. We don’t know if the good Flame will be censored and disarmed, but we hope not, given his involuntary comedy. How much genuine amusement would be lost.
