Strange Things
So this last scene with Bond and Mathis. When I first read this, it went something like: “hey, they’re flirting… [turns page between strips 20 and 21 okay that’s kinda risqué, I know it doesn’t mean that but it’s still… aaand Bond’s getting dressed now? Huh?”.  My filmic convention sense is telling me they’re having a quickie but my common sense is telling me that that’s impossible.So why do I still keep reading it that way? I think it’s a kind of fishbulb situation, with three different things going on to make it look like there’s a fourth.1) The dialogue – abridged from Fleming, and there’s no suggestion of anything untoward in the original.2) The artwork – Mathis is being a wee tease and Bond is Cary Granting all over the place. Then there’s the mystery of Bond’s quick change, which if it’d happened between strips would probably have gone unnoticed. Happening between panels calls attention to it, and I’d guess that this is down to inexperience.3) The conceit – Bond needs to have a fair amount of information about the current situation and by having Mathis provide it, we’re also learning about the characters: two colleagues meet up and are comfortable around each other, thus quickly establishing that they are also friends. 4) Present vs. past – As I mentioned before: Bond asks what now?, Mathis makes a blatant reference to fellatio, there’s a change of panel and Mathis sits on Bond’s bed and lights a cigarette while watching Bond get dressed. I know that’s shorthand now for the sexin’ going on, but it wasn’t back then – the cultural cues hadn’t turned up yet. It wouldn’t occur to someone reading this strip in 1958 that that was implied, because the visual (and maybe also the spoken) language of the day didn’t mean that.Then there’s the history, which pretty much finalises the whole thing. In 1954, the Home Office (British internal affairs department) set up a committee to look at the legal issues surrounding the then-illegal prostitution and male homosexuality. The committee was made up of 15 highly respectable members of society and was chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, John Wolfenden (later Sir John Wolfenden). The committee spent three years investigating research into these normally taboo subjects – it should be pointed out that female sexuality wasn’t debated as same-sex relationships between women have never been illegal in Britain.In September 1957, the report was published. Controversially for the time, the report recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”. Although the government rejected this proposal amid fears it would be unpopular with the general public, it was only a matter of time before things changed. In England and Wales, male homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967, with Scotland following suit in 1981 and Northern Ireland in 1982.Our Casino Royale story here was printed in July-December 1958, starting less than a year after the publication of the Wolfenden Report. It was also the first Bond comic and something of an experiment. Ian Fleming had had to be convinced of the project’s validity and the adaptation was written by the Express’ literary editor rather than an established comic writer. There was no way it was going to contain anything remotely controversial. If this scene between Bond and Mathis had contained even implied homoeroticism, it would have been a national scandal. In short, it didn’t happen.The interesting twist to this story, however, is that the real-life counterparts of Bond and Mathis may well have engaged in casual sex without regard to social conventions. The secret services, and not just SIS, have never had a problem with recruiting gay agents. There’s a theory (which doesn’t seem to have much evidence other than being told by ex-spies) that for a long time gay men made for good intelligence agents because they, at least partially, shared a skill set. Both required secrecy, lying, setting up clandestine meetings and so on. There’s another theory I’ve heard anecdotally that gay men were actually preferred as intelligence agents as they didn’t have any family commitments that could be used against them, although this theory has an obvious flaw.Blackmail has always been an issue for spies. When you’re only concerned with results, you don’t have any scruples about how you get those results. Spies male and female, gay and straight, were expected to use any means at their disposal to get results. And if a spy has a secret – say, for example, being a gay man in a society where it’s illegal – that secret can be exploited.Jeremy Wolfenden had a secret. Sir John’s son was a prodigious intellectual and had a weakness for boys and booze. He was also highly arrogant and developed a philosophy of deliberate under-achievement to spite a society which took him and his gifts for granted. He was recruited by SIS after graduating from Oxford University, and, in 1962, took a cover job as the Moscow correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.He was seduced soon after – on KGB orders – by the barber for the Soviet Ministry for Foreign Trade. A KGB agent (who’d been hiding in Jeremy’s wardrobe) photographed the two of them in a compromising situation and threatened to send the photographs to the Telegraph unless Jeremy provided them with information on British activity in Moscow. Jeremy, not being an idiot, immediately reported the situation to his superiors at SIS. Unfortunately for him, they saw it as an opportunity rather than a cause for concern. He was told to co-operate with the KGB: to become, in effect, a double agent.Now under immense pressure from two directions, his nerves collapsed. He suffered a breakdown and drank even more, while somehow managing to keep both sides content. He died in “mysterious circumstances” in Washington (where he was then working) in 1965, aged 31. Officially he fainted and hit his head on a wash basin, but it’s generally considered that he drank himself to death.Obviously this particular incident isn’t a factor in Fleming’s novel, seeing as it happened a decade  or so after Casino Royale was written. However, it does demonstrate the sort of pressure that intelligence agents were under and we don’t have many real-life examples to look at. Fleming, as Humanoid Female wrote, was very familiar with these pressures. There’s a whole sub-plot about Bond’s attitude towards women agents in general and Vesper specifically, so I can’t really say much more about it just now without spoilers.For all that Fleming himself is very much an establishment figure, he does do a very good job of giving characters their own views. Bond’s attitude towards women, here at the start, is socially conservative as was normal at the time (and there’s a much better place in the story to talk about that), but that does change as his character develops. The comic handles things slightly differently than the novel, but as that goes on right up until the very end, I’ll have to put it on ice for now.Also this may just have been a flimsy premise to tell people about Jeremy Wolfenden. -kiffkin

So this last scene with Bond and Mathis. When I first read this, it went something like: “hey, they’re flirting… [turns page between strips 20 and 21 okay that’s kinda risqué, I know it doesn’t mean that but it’s still… aaand Bond’s getting dressed now? Huh?”.  My filmic convention sense is telling me they’re having a quickie but my common sense is telling me that that’s impossible.

So why do I still keep reading it that way? I think it’s a kind of fishbulb situation, with three different things going on to make it look like there’s a fourth.

1) The dialogue – abridged from Fleming, and there’s no suggestion of anything untoward in the original.
2) The artwork – Mathis is being a wee tease and Bond is Cary Granting all over the place. Then there’s the mystery of Bond’s quick change, which if it’d happened between strips would probably have gone unnoticed. Happening between panels calls attention to it, and I’d guess that this is down to inexperience.
3) The conceit – Bond needs to have a fair amount of information about the current situation and by having Mathis provide it, we’re also learning about the characters: two colleagues meet up and are comfortable around each other, thus quickly establishing that they are also friends.
4) Present vs. past – As I mentioned before: Bond asks what now?, Mathis makes a blatant reference to fellatio, there’s a change of panel and Mathis sits on Bond’s bed and lights a cigarette while watching Bond get dressed. I know that’s shorthand now for the sexin’ going on, but it wasn’t back then – the cultural cues hadn’t turned up yet. It wouldn’t occur to someone reading this strip in 1958 that that was implied, because the visual (and maybe also the spoken) language of the day didn’t mean that.

Then there’s the history, which pretty much finalises the whole thing. In 1954, the Home Office (British internal affairs department) set up a committee to look at the legal issues surrounding the then-illegal prostitution and male homosexuality. The committee was made up of 15 highly respectable members of society and was chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of Reading University, John Wolfenden (later Sir John Wolfenden). The committee spent three years investigating research into these normally taboo subjects – it should be pointed out that female sexuality wasn’t debated as same-sex relationships between women have never been illegal in Britain.

In September 1957, the report was published. Controversially for the time, the report recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence”. Although the government rejected this proposal amid fears it would be unpopular with the general public, it was only a matter of time before things changed. In England and Wales, male homosexual acts were decriminalised in 1967, with Scotland following suit in 1981 and Northern Ireland in 1982.

Our Casino Royale story here was printed in July-December 1958, starting less than a year after the publication of the Wolfenden Report. It was also the first Bond comic and something of an experiment. Ian Fleming had had to be convinced of the project’s validity and the adaptation was written by the Express’ literary editor rather than an established comic writer. There was no way it was going to contain anything remotely controversial. If this scene between Bond and Mathis had contained even implied homoeroticism, it would have been a national scandal. In short, it didn’t happen.

The interesting twist to this story, however, is that the real-life counterparts of Bond and Mathis may well have engaged in casual sex without regard to social conventions. The secret services, and not just SIS, have never had a problem with recruiting gay agents. There’s a theory (which doesn’t seem to have much evidence other than being told by ex-spies) that for a long time gay men made for good intelligence agents because they, at least partially, shared a skill set. Both required secrecy, lying, setting up clandestine meetings and so on. There’s another theory I’ve heard anecdotally that gay men were actually preferred as intelligence agents as they didn’t have any family commitments that could be used against them, although this theory has an obvious flaw.

Blackmail has always been an issue for spies. When you’re only concerned with results, you don’t have any scruples about how you get those results. Spies male and female, gay and straight, were expected to use any means at their disposal to get results. And if a spy has a secret – say, for example, being a gay man in a society where it’s illegal – that secret can be exploited.

Jeremy Wolfenden had a secret. Sir John’s son was a prodigious intellectual and had a weakness for boys and booze. He was also highly arrogant and developed a philosophy of deliberate under-achievement to spite a society which took him and his gifts for granted. He was recruited by SIS after graduating from Oxford University, and, in 1962, took a cover job as the Moscow correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

He was seduced soon after – on KGB orders – by the barber for the Soviet Ministry for Foreign Trade. A KGB agent (who’d been hiding in Jeremy’s wardrobe) photographed the two of them in a compromising situation and threatened to send the photographs to the Telegraph unless Jeremy provided them with information on British activity in Moscow. Jeremy, not being an idiot, immediately reported the situation to his superiors at SIS. Unfortunately for him, they saw it as an opportunity rather than a cause for concern. He was told to co-operate with the KGB: to become, in effect, a double agent.

Now under immense pressure from two directions, his nerves collapsed. He suffered a breakdown and drank even more, while somehow managing to keep both sides content. He died in “mysterious circumstances” in Washington (where he was then working) in 1965, aged 31. Officially he fainted and hit his head on a wash basin, but it’s generally considered that he drank himself to death.

Obviously this particular incident isn’t a factor in Fleming’s novel, seeing as it happened a decade  or so after Casino Royale was written. However, it does demonstrate the sort of pressure that intelligence agents were under and we don’t have many real-life examples to look at. Fleming, as Humanoid Female wrote, was very familiar with these pressures. There’s a whole sub-plot about Bond’s attitude towards women agents in general and Vesper specifically, so I can’t really say much more about it just now without spoilers.

For all that Fleming himself is very much an establishment figure, he does do a very good job of giving characters their own views. Bond’s attitude towards women, here at the start, is socially conservative as was normal at the time (and there’s a much better place in the story to talk about that), but that does change as his character develops. The comic handles things slightly differently than the novel, but as that goes on right up until the very end, I’ll have to put it on ice for now.

Also this may just have been a flimsy premise to tell people about Jeremy Wolfenden.

-kiffkin

Posted 3 months ago
Tagged: kiffkin, comic, Something Awful, quote, james bond, .