Written in 1993 for Forbes FYI magazine
If you can make it in from the airport to South Beach without getting killed, Miami might be the most fun city in North America. Let the media carp about drive-by shootings, drug smugglers, phony land ventures, and a few armed revolutionaries. To a casual visitor with survival skills, it’s always Saturday in Miami and the Human Condition is nowhere else as visually pleasing year-round. Like an outlandish stew of St. Tropez, Soho, and Havana, Miami may not make sense, but then common sense is not what’s being appealed to here.
There are many Miamis, spread across sixteen islands. Some you don’t want to know about, much less explore; some no longer seem compelling, like, say, Jackie Gleason’s Miami. The one everybody gets in a lather about today lies at the southern end of it all, a national historic register area known as South Beach, or even SoBe. The square mile from 6th to 23rd Street is the largest art deco district in the world, with about eight hundred "important" buildings dating from 1923 to 1943. Ten years ago they wrote it off as the most faded of God’s waiting rooms; now it’s a pulsating streamlined heaven, if your vision of the afterlife means salsa, margaritas, sixteen modelling agencies, the glare of sunlit sand, and little sleep.
The most direct approach to South Beach is simply to cab it to the News Cafe, drink yourself legless on iced cappucinos, watch the beauties go by with the beach glittering behind, and read Carl Hiassen’s Tourist Season, a carefree, bloody romp about a Florida crocodile with a voracious love for out-of-staters. To get maximum enjoyment out of Miami, however, it helps to have a Cuban companion with plenty of time on his hands. Like my old friend Jorge.
I warned him that for this visit I had only a day. "So what’s the mystery?" said Jorge (a professional violinist), collecting me at the airport. "Take off your jacket and leave the rest to me."
We sped across the Macarthur Causeway (as the local joke goes, the shortest route from Havana to Tel Aviv). A first sight of South Beach’s Ocean Drive astonishes: gone is geriatric Miami, instead you’re cruising a film set with real palm trees, water, and gorgeous young people. You head a block inland and, if you’re lucky, park.
The 11th Street Diner is a chrome-and-formica 1946 relic made more authentic through a loving restoration: two old dining cars mashed into one structure, a collision that was an improvement, as one’s a bar now. (Their milkshakes and malts are known as the best on the beach.) The menu boasts standard Miami fare: macaroni, tofu, omelettes, marinated dolphin, cheesecake, smoked salmon and bagels. Though the diner’s consistently voted the best place for late-night eats, Jorge insisted we gather our energies there with breakfast.
"You want me, or you want good service?" said our waitress.
In Miami double entendres often seem the preferred gambit.
"Don’t ask me these philosophical questions," said Jorge.
A few doors down we looked into a good general food & bar joint called Lulu’s. "My temple of art," Jorge insisted, referring not to the downstairs devoted to American kitsch (service station signs, old Coca-Cola ads) but the upstairs devoted to the King—Elvis carpets, film stills, guitar clocks, license plates, street signs, lamps, statues, busts, plates, and a reproduction of the first dollar he ever earned (April, 1951). If Elvis were currently making movies, this would be a primo setting: Viva South Beach!
There is, of course, the beach itself, a long broad stretch of hard sand, surprisingly clean, surprisingly topless, with free wooden lounge chairs. Freighters and the occasional sailboat awaken the horizon, but you’re not really watching them anyway. A bronzed man in peak condition is meditating upside-down in a yogic posture; without warning he upends and dashes into the gleaming water, past two naked Scandinavian masterpieces discussing Ibsen. The sea is warm and very clean—unbelievable, to be able to swim so easily right in a U.S. city, like a weird new definition of civilization.
Through the palms, the pastel rectangular art deco skyline of whites, blues, and yellows seems too low for this century. Volleyball is played seriously on the sand: the beauty of the conception, as Jorge put it, is you wear as little as you want and who notices?
"No one but you," I suggested.
"Now listen, amigo," said Jorge. "You’re new in town, so I’m going to offer you a choice. For lunch we can either stop by my apartment, hustle up a little tunafish sandwich, some mustard, some mayo, catch a game show. Or else we stick to fabulous Miami Beach, we check out one of the important structural achievements in what they call the art deco idiom where I happen to know a bartender almost personally and you can eat four-star food, a little wine, and experience the supreme beautiful female genius of the world strutting back and forth like targets, man, in a holy shooting gallery, you know what I’m saying? So I’m giving you the choice."
"I’ll take the shooting gallery," I said.
And along Ocean Drive they do walk past, as if paid by the hour: models on rollerblades, in sandals, in bikinis, arm-in-arm in conspiracy against a gawping male world, occasionally passed by a hero windsurfing along the esplanade on a skateboard-cum-sail.
At the Colony (its triple-sided neon sign one of night’s icons in South Beach) a newcomer is downright grateful for the fierce air conditioning that enables him to better appreciate pastel walls, half-globe lights, enormous potted palms, marble tables, and a great ’30s painting of a jungle scene. Best of all is the food in such a lavish setting (the restaurant fronting a hotel, by the way): lobster gazpacho, pan-fried crab cakes, a mango-creme brulée in a "hurricane" of fruit sauces. While you’re debating coffee, a madman named Jorge starts screaming that it’s time for a Madrid newspaper.
A minute’s walk up Ocean Drive you reach the News Cafe, the epicenter of the social earthquake that shook Miami a decade ago. A man of reason, unencumbered by Jorge, has little to do except plonk himself alfresco and wait as only people in tropical climates can, for all the beauty and foreign press of the world to arrive. . . .
"Buddy boy, we’re wasting time here," said Jorge, and yanked me off toward Coral Gables—where the wealthy traditionally built their mansions. The grandest, right beside Madonna’s recent $4 million acquisition, is Vizcaya, an Italian renaissance villa with gardens built in WWI for John Deering, who owned International Harvester. The gardens took five years; the entire 180-acre enterprise employed a tenth of Miami’s population, and involved cutting back tropical jungle and putting in a railroad, a dairy, a poultry farm, a mule stable; fruit, vegetable, flower gardens; tennis courts and canoe waterways. . . . Following Deering’s death in 1925 (he had four years of enjoyment after it was finished), his heirs sold it to Dade County. A museum now, it’s become what Deering evidently intended: his living monument, a latter-day equivalent of Cheops’ Pyramid.
And a reminder of how much great art of twenty-five centuries it was possible for a wealthy man early this century to accumulate. What Deering bought no one could afford today: from a gala standpoint of tapestries, statues, carpets, tiles, this is the ultimate villa.
After all this highbrow culture my nerves were a bit frayed, so we roared back to South Beach and the Sterling Club, a swank poolroom with a period bar, whose twelve superb tables were just getting underway. Jorge took dinner money off me and suggested we eat early. "You want to lose again, we can come back at 4 a.m."
For dinner Amano is still the place, if you can afford it, ultra-modern decor in the only non-deco building on Ocean Drive. The menu is a schizophrenic local melange, nouvelle Miami: say, macademia-crusted softshell crab with soba noodles and Thai curry butter sauce, followed by almond / black pepper salmon and citrus cous cous or Chinese B.B.Q. chicken with plantain mash cornflan, and a passionfruit cheesecake with raspberry sauce.
Jorge had raved about the Talkhouse all day—an ideal-size music club, with a courtyard bar in back. He said they consistently offer world-class salsa (if they don’t, try Lario’s On the Beach).
"And tonight, my friend, is no exception," said Jorge. "We are talking about a monumental event in Miami salsa. A hot local band named Abasi with two unbelievable guests. Both legends in Havana. Cachao on bass—an inventor of the mambo who revolutionized salsa back in 1959 with one historic jam session. And on congas, Patato. I don’t know when they came over, but this night you won’t forget."
He wasn’t exaggerating. Cachao, an enormous man with a brooding forehead (like a mulatto bull elephant in suspenders) attacked the bass as if it were a percussion instrument, pulling the rest of the band (piano, drums, chiquita singer) into his riffs. Patato was his opposite—a small, dapper, mahogany man, mustached, in borsalino hat, tie and jacket, approaching seventy. Not much taller than his four congas, he treated them like disobedient children, admonishing, instructing, and commanding; instead of a blitzkrieg of speed he could control your attention with a few whacks that brought people to their feet. One voluptuous young woman in a slinky black dress, propelled by the music, did a sexual shimmy through the club that had the musicians sweating and the crowd roaring. (She turned out to be a feature journalist for the Miami Herald.) It was incandescent, joyous music, and when there was an intermission Patato went from table to table getting his picture taken with females of all ages.
After so much upheaval we were both hungry, so at midnight Jorge and I ended up at one of the best Cuban restaurants in town, the Puerto Sagua, which looks like a New York coffee shop except for the 3D mural of Havana’s Plaza de Catedral in the back. A fried bisteco palomilla got me moving, along with coffee like jet fuel.
Now that we were awake, at one in the morning we needed a drink, and out of too many chic bars Jorge chose a fancy, low-key bar-restaurant, the Strand—grand in scale, spacious, high-ceilinged, with latticed lights, marbled arches, great red sofas, mosaiced columns, and great hanging urn lights in domes, with a good menu as well. According to the pretty bartender, the crowd was always "lots and lots of models and a few lecherous men—you guys stand a very good chance." As which one, she didn’t specify.
Tempting as it was to overnight somewhere sleek and modernist, I needed a break from South Beach, so I got Jorge to drop me at a hotel over in Coconut Grove. I was surprised, by this point, that they let me stagger in.
"Don’t worry so much, amigo," was his final message, as he delivered me to the airport the next morning. "Never forget: in Miami the sun always shines for the cool." Here endeth the sermon.
Friday, November 5, 1993
Wednesday, June 2, 1993
The Watch
I wrote this short story, never offered for publication, as a deliberate exercise in the early 1990s. The idea was to take a short story of the past and update it. I used Guy de Maupassant’s (1850-1893) masterly The Necklace, which goes by many titles in translation and is really about the relationship within the couple, not about the necklace. Flaubert wrote his own version, as did Henry James and V. S. Pritchett. Well, I figured, what was good enough for them was good enough for me.
It began, you see, not as a simple deception but simply as a gift. I am too good a businessman not to know the limits of my own success and I take a modest delight in transcending them. At that time, at my age—fifty-three—I could afford to buy for my young second wife, Sylvia, anything she wanted. My company, mine and mine alone, specialized in handsome leather-bound and gilt-edged datebooks, notebooks, address books, memo books, etc. You have got to specialize to succeed big: Exodus, VI.
I wasn't surprised that the sudden rise of the pocket-size personal computer industry had hurt my business not at all, perhaps even encouraged it. Let the buzzards bicker all they want; my line is status, and there is no substitute for the fragrance of genuine morocco, which by the way comes nowadays from southeast Asia. No substitute, in other words, for the real thing, when it comes to status. In an endlessly perverse world, you see, status is the preferred form of truth.
This is scripture out of the N. T., from the Bible for All Businessmen, William Marlow Edition, not available to the general public. From Genesis came my belief in never missing a chance to create a better deal where before there was only darkness; no matter how thick the serpents lie on the ground, Eden may wait just around the corner. Say what you will of mistakes I made, at the end of the day my opponents and colleagues alike know me as a gentle man, grown portly of late, who does his own travelling and buying himself, by himself. The selling you can leave to lesser luminaries in a company; any fool can sell. It takes special genius to know how to buy.
I was on one of my bimonthly buying trips, and had finished three days of business in Singapore—a new contract with a smart young company that produced marbleized endpapers for me, quick to spot an opening as Chinese always are. Having planned a week’s stay, I decided on a surprise swing through Bangkok to investigate printing possibilities there. I don't and never did believe in resting, no matter what day of the week—Deuteronomy, XVII—and I'd never been to Bangkok. I telephoned Sylvia on the other side of the world at the summer house on the Jersey shore and left a message with our fat Barbadian housekeeper about the change of plans. After six years together, Sylvia was used to living on-the-fly and rather enjoyed, I think, my unpredictability.
Bangkok in July was sweltering. I don't need to tell you how heat dampens a man's spirit and leaves him open to temptation. I assured myself in one sticky afternoon I’d best stick with my printers in Hong Kong. The Thais smelled rancid to me: a charmless people too busy trying to make a penny on each side to see where the dollar profits lie. I went back to my hotel and had them change my ticket (Tokyo / Los Angeles / New York) to the next morning. I reminded them to confirm an aisle seat—Travels, XIV—then decided to go out for a walk before dinner. I knew Sylvia would ask me about Bangkok. She always teased me about avoiding the city out of worry about what mischief I might get myself into there.
"Every other man who goes there gets what he wants," she said. “Why shouldn't you? Just don't bring back anything dangerous.”
I wasn't interested in risking any diseases, but I also wasn't sure quite what to bring her instead. I have never been at ease choosing presents. It always seems a little amateurish; and you can easily end up wasting your time on items that aren't first-rate, you see. Still, I went for a walk. It wasn't far from the confines of my hotel, the famous one with a string quartet sawing wood in the lobby, to Patpong, the so-called Street of Sex.
At this point nearly everywhere reminds me of somewhere else. Patpong reminded me of New Orleans—less lascivious than I’d imagined, with little of the pure lust they advertise. I know how to buy; I know what pure lust is. The Thai girls with their long black eyes and their long black hair strode around in miniskirts and invoked me with their hellos, and clung to my arm for a friendly moment, or danced naked to deafening music in ground-floor bars with obscene names and stroboscopic lights where upstairs, no doubt, I could have absolutely anything I desired done to me. This much I saw from the street.
None of that fascinated me as much as the fact that Patpong’s tables and stalls were busy selling every imaginable brand-name fake by the thousands. Fake upon fake, from videos and cassettes to Chanel T-shirts and leather Gucci bags and Kenzo pocketbooks and Cartier watches. Not one of them the real McTavish. Most of Patpong’s clients weren’t desperate men but elderly tourists or American teenagers buying fake Levi's blue jeans or Ray-Ban sunglasses. And there was a real McDonald's on the corner whose antiseptic light made even the available girls look innocent. On a whim I had dinner there and eavesdropped—I'd have made a good spy—on a German trying to convince a slender local lovely to come away with him to Koh Samui for a week.
On a greater whim I finished my cheeseburger, walked ten yards along Patpong, and found myself bargaining over a fake Rolex watch for Sylvia.
My intention, you see, was to buy it simply as a joke. Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other and besides, I had bought her a very handsome gold and jeweled Rolex for our second anniversary for more than ten thousand dollars. I thought it would be rather a good joke to buy her a fake one.
The joke was that it was a beautiful watch. What caught my eye was the style: it seemed deliberately aged, perhaps thirty-five years old, squarish, mannish for a lady, with a tinted face and slant formal numbers, very distinguished, with sleek echos in it of the Art Deco style. I can't say why, but that wristwatch reminded me of Lauren Bacall and those old Bogart films. The watchband was cheap black plastic but even as I glanced over at the others, the watch leaped out at me like Sylvia herself from the table of heavy silver and gold men's Rolex and Omega and Bulova and Patek and Christian Dior imitations. I moved several around experimentally before the vendor pushed the one I wanted before me.
"Let's have a look at you," I said, and held it up and turned it this way and that. I put it back on the table.
"Not bad," I said. "Not much of a watchband, though. What will you take for it?"
His first price, nine hundred baht, was stratospheric.
“Nonsense,” I said, and turned on my heel. He pulled me back. "Just a moment," he said. “Best price." He stabbed away at his calculator and offered me a 5% reduction. "Don't waste my time," I told him, and walked away again. He pulled me back like a stagehand with a hook, told me about his family miseries, and knocked off another point or two. It took me ten minutes, but I chewed him down another forty percent to about eight dollars American, including a replacement leather watchband. I was so engaged in securing this wristwatch for Sylvia that it didn't occur to me look for one for myself.
"Beautiful watch, sah. Taiwan-made, not Hong Kong. Better."
"Don't be absurd. Better? It's a fake," I said.
“Yes, yes," he said, taking the money and counting it with skillful fingers. “But work always better in Taiwan. You wait and see. That why your Rolex more expensive than Hong Kong Rolex."
Oddly enough, it was the fellow in the plane beside me between Bangkok and Tokyo the next morning who confirmed that. It was one of those rumpled youngish men who seem to be perpetually travelling but whom you rarely see among the professionals in the front section. This made me think he might know what he was talking about.
I had taken the watch out and was having a good look at it, in the light of day and all that, and thinking: what a laugh Sylvia will have when I get home. Miriam would've been incensed, of course.
"Handsome watch," said the fellow. "What kind?"
"Rolex," I said.
"Can't beat that," he says. "May I?"
"Be my guest," I said, and handed it over. I let him look for a moment, debating whether to spoil the fun, and finally I asked, as if I weren't sure myself, “How old do you suppose she is?"
"That's a good one," he said. “It's harder to date a Rolex than you might expect. Because they keep ahead of everyone and yet remain classical in terms of style. I’d say—oh, late fifties. Am I warm?”
"Not even tepid," I said, taking the watch back.
“Guess what I paid," I said.
He flushed. Money embarrasses the young.
“I wouldn't presume—" he began.
“Presume away.”
“Nine? No, no,” he corrected himself. "I'll say eight thousand dollars.”
"Seven," I said. "Only seven.”
"In fact," I said conspiratorially, "That's a Taiwan Rolex. Not a Swiss one. Seven dollars. Think I overpaid?"
He took the watch back from me without asking, he was so astonished. He looked like someone about to blow a bubble. He made a careful examination, right down to the silver label and serial number on the back. He peered carefully at the lettering on the face. He shook his head. He said finally, "And we think we're going to beat those people at light industry? We don't have a chance."
"Now you're learning," I said.
He had, no doubt, spotted the ring on my finger. He said casually, "Do you think your wife will know the difference?"
"I'll tell her, of course."
“I wouldn't," he said.
Now it was my turn to be astonished. You may find this difficult to believe, but that possibility hadn't crossed my mind. As I said, Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other. Psalms, X.
"It'll amuse her to have one from Bangkok," I said. "Even if she never wears it. I picked her up a real one, a beauty, a few years back."
He shrugged. "None of my business. Still, that's an exceptionally handsome watch. It's an immaculate copy. No one will ever know the difference. Why spoil it for her?"
I dismissed this right away. Not long afterward he got off the plane in Tokyo, and I had both seats to myself for the duration of the flight. I alone must take responsibility for my decision. But I don't need to tell you that eighteen hours’ flying at thirty thousand feet can do strange things to a man’s judgment. Even in first class.
"Why, it's beautiful," Sylvia said, and laid it across her wrist. "You're outrageous, darling, you know you've already given me one."
"Not one like this," I said.
She had that triumphant glow on her lovely face that I always associate with a square-rigger under full sail; and her auburn hair swept back and shining like her eyes. At a moment like that I would always think that to be childless was not so important to her, that the security and luxury I had given her against the chaos of her own family was enough. Nobody meeting her would ever have guessed what she had made her way up from. Should I tell her the truth? I wondered. Would she see the joke? In this case I wasn't so sure she would. And, to tell you the truth, the watch really shone on her wrist, and I don't think it was the blouse or shoes she was wearing that day in particular. For once, I had got a present right.
I did not tell her the watch was a fake. She was very happy to have me home, and thanked me in her way, even though I could only stay for the weekend and was back in Manhattan on Monday morning.
Our arrangement in the summer was this: I spent four nights in the week at the apartment on East 53rd and then three nights with her out on the shore, unless we had tickets to a show or a concert, for my wife is a music-lover. In that case, she would come in. (I always enjoyed the opera, even before meeting Sylvia, but Miriam and I were not subscribers.) As it was, I did not see her from Monday morning until Friday evening, which was just as well as my sense of time was very confused from travelling halfway around the world and I wouldn't have been very good company. She came to pick me up at the breezy train station, as usual, but I sensed right away something amiss.
“I didn’t want to to trouble you in the city,” she said. “I'm sure it's nothing. It's the new Rolex. I’ve worn it every day, I'm mad about it. But it stopped yesterday. It's the strangest thing. The other one never has."
Mentally I cursed the Thais and all their progeny. How had I let myself be hoodwinked? Perhaps it was simply the quartz. I swallowed and made grumbling noises. That would've been the time to tell her—another opportunity that convenient might not come my way again. But I didn't seize it.
"Leave it to me," I said. "I'm sure it's only the battery. I'll have it replaced on Monday. You're coming in for Mozart on Tuesday, no? So you can wear it that night."
"Be sure to take it in to Samuelson’s," she said. "I don't want just any old dealer fiddling with it, they're not used to to dealing with watches of that quality."
"Don't worry," I said. You notice I didn't exactly agree.
I was relieved, anyway, that she hadn't taken it to some local fellow who might ask her where it came from and get openly suspicious. Down on the shore they have a tendency, I've noticed, to strike back against the outsiders who keep their bread buttered.
I wasn't about to take the watch into Samuelson, who'd sold me Sylvia's anniversary Rolex four years earlier and her necklace last winter and several other items in-between. After all, it was simply a question of replacing a battery. There was a large electronics store around the corner from my offices, run by a family of Koreans. They'd sold me camera equipment from time to time and I noticed they have a selection of digital watches. I went round right off the train first thing Monday morning.
“Stop already, eh?” said the young man at the watch counter when I handed over the Rolex. I didn't like his smile, it seemed to say: Serves you right for being rich enough to buy one of these.
With a tiny screwdriver he pried open the back, a little maliciously, I thought. I said sharply, "Be careful with that."
“Yeah, yeah, careful.”
He pulled the battery out with tweezers like a dentist removing a rotten filling. When he started to open a a package with a new battery, some impulse made me ask him to check the old one first. Over the years you develop instincts that you have to follow, even when behind them lies only bad news.
He nodded and attached my dead battery into some apparatus on the wall. He took it out with some surprise and set it before me on the counter. He said, “Battery okay, no problem,” and looked bored.
I hate the way these foreigners move in, out of their broken sweatshops and their choking cities, and not knowing the first thing about local business practices, they set themselves up and get around important regulations by collaborating with their cousins back home; and when you wander in for a little assistance in a catastrophe of their own people’s making they treat you disdainfully.
I said to this young man, “Pay attention. What’s wrong with it, then? If it isn't the battery?”
He shrugged and indicated the watch’s innards with his screwdriver. "Can be anything, maybe," he said.
We both waited for the other to speak. He skated the battery back and forth like a chess piece on the counter, called out something in his language to someone a counter over, then turned back, surprised I was still there. He said, "You want me to put the battery back?"
"That's exactly what I'd like.”
He did so swiftly, punched the back in place, then pushed the watch over to me. "No charge, sir," he said, and glanced away, waiting for me to leave, not willing to admit his own inadequacy. I did not thank him. I thought: Let him learn the hard way.
At the office everything was shipshape. I left a little early for lunch and went around to Samuelson's over on Madison. I thought: This has gone far enough. I felt a little apprehensive when I walked in, but another client, some woman, was leaving and Samuelson greeted me cheerfully, a grasshopper with his antennae on the alert and his hand out.
"Mr. Marlow, good to see you again, sir. You're looking very well these days."
"Probably this diet Mrs. Marlow's got me on.”
"They do know how to look after us, don't they? Now, what can I do for you this afternoon, Mr. Marlow?"
He wanted to demonstrate how well he remembered my name after not seeing me for over a year. Can't blame him for that—it's a technique I use myself. Labors, I. Names are everything.
I said, “It's about a watch I bought Mrs. Marlow overseas. It seems to be broken.”
“I'll be surprised if we can't take care of it. May I see the watch?"
This was an embarrassing moment for me, but I had steeled myself for it. I will credit Samuelson that his eyes betrayed little of what he must have thought.
He said gently, "It certainly doesn't seem to be running.” He cleared his throat. “May I, uh, ask you Mr. Marlow, how much you paid for this wristwatch?”
From the way he peered closely at the face I suspected he knew. I said, hitting the ball into his court, “About eight.”
I still held out hope he might say: Ah, eight thousand.
"Eight dollars?" he said. But there was no astonished surprise in his voice: he knew the watch was fake.
"That's right.”
His lips were pursed, not sealed. He did not look at me but at the watch as he spoke. "Hong Kong?"
"No, I bought it in Bangkok."
"I was referring to where it was made."
I paused. "I was told by the vendor that the best copies come from Taiwan. Like this one."
He shrugged. "Perhaps, Mr. Marlow. This one smells like Hong Kong to me." He handed it over. "Not a very good copy, I'm afraid."
"What's wrong with it?” I said, a little loudly I'm sure, then caught myself. "Apart from the fact it doesn't work."
"There's nothing wrong with it,” he said, with a little too much emphasis on the word for my taste. “For eight dollars it's probably not a bad buy. But it doesn't resemble a Rolex at all. Except for the fact it bears the name."
He saw I was not impressed with this vague speech.
He said, “Look at the label on the back. It's the wrong color and size and shape, to start with. It's not even well-affixed. The instant I saw that label, I knew your watch hadn't even come out of Taiwan, much less Switzerland. And it says on the face that it's a quartz watch. Rolex simply doesn't make quartz watches, period. Never have. Even more evident, it's not a sweep second hand. See how it ticks off the individual seconds? Rolex has never made a watch like that. And it's missing, at the base of the face, a certain word which you'll see immediately if you look at the Rolex you purchased here several years ago. And look at the quality of the crystal.” He tapped the glass and we listened to the clack of cheapness. He smiled sympathetically. "Do you want me to go on, Mr. Marlow? It's simply a question of professionalism, that's all. I spotted it immediately because it's my line of work to know the difference. You shouldn't feel bad. I have customers come in as you did, but after having paid several thousand dollars for a copy no better than yours. It's a shame.”
I could practically see his antennae waving in triumph. I don't like being made to feel like a fool anymore than the next man; plus I had my company's reputation to think of. When he was finished I said, “Well, what's to be done?”
"The watch is for Mrs. Marlow, of course.”
Was he suggesting I had a mistress? "Yes, of course.”
"Have you given it to her yet?”
"I'm afraid so. I had planned to give it to her as a gag, but she liked it so much—”
"Of course," he said soothingly. "And now you don't wish to tell her?"
“I don’t think so.”
He said delicately, “Perhaps if put the right way—”
"It's too much of an insult.”
"I see."
I said, "Is it an exact copy of a particular Rolex? Perhaps I could purchase a genuine one and exchange watchbands."
I thought my willingness to part with another king’s ransom might disarm him, but it had no effect. He shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid not. Let me show you something." He pulled a hefty book like a phone directory down from the shelf behind him and flipped through it. "There, you see what they've done? Those crafty fellows over in H. K. They've amalgamated two different designs, one from 1947, the other from 1933. Your Rolex really doesn't exist. It's like a pair of mismatched Siamese twins. Right part of the world, anyway.”
I had made the noble gesture, at least. I said, “And what about repairing this one?"
He said, "Normally, Mr. Marlow, as I'm sure you understand, we legitimate watch dealers absolutely refuse to repair copies. It’s bad for everyone, our customers in particular, if we do. It diminishes the fine watches we sell and it diminishes our clients.”
“Perhaps you could make an exception, Mr. Samuelson. I’ve been a very good customer of yours for many years, as two Mrs. Marlows would attest,” I said, steadily.
“One of our most faithful. And we appreciate that you came to us with this problem.” He sighed, for both our predicaments. “Let us at least see what’s wrong. Perhaps it’s only a battery. Any number of shops could install a fresh battery for you, if that’s the case.”
I did not tell him I had already been through this elsewhere. He opened the back expertly with a precision tool, but I noticed he didn't have one of those apparati for testing the battery. He slipped in a new one and said, "I did mention to you that a Rolex is never battery-powered, didn't I? Of course I did. Now let's see what difference a new battery makes.”
It didn't, naturally, make any difference at all. The watch resolutely refused to run.
"Oh, dear,” said Mr. Samuelson. “Just a moment.” He disappeared into a back room and returned with a strange band slipped over his skull with a sort of headlight built-in with, I assume, a magnifying glass. He looked like Jiminy Cricket in a space helmet. He opened the watch’s back again with his little tool and switched on his headlight and peered down.
“Oh, dear,” he repeated.
“What is it?” I dislike being at anyone’s mercy.
He switched off his hi-beam and removed his space helmet.
“Junk, Mr. Marlow,” he said. “Junk, plain and simple. I would suspect your watch wasn't made more than three months ago. And in Bangkok, I bet—it's not even of Hong Kong quality. It's got a lifetime of six months at most. There’s nothing to be done with it. Throw it out. I'll throw it out for you, if you like.”
He was capable of it, too, but I held onto the watchband. “Can't you save the face and replace the innards?”
"One can always save face, Mr. Marlow. We don't do that sort of work here. Besides, it's risky at best. Suppose you repair this watch. Your wife wears it. It's a handsome watch, we must admit this. We see why you bought it and why Mrs. Marlow, with her taste, enjoys wearing it. But supposing she shows it to one of her friends, as we both know women are prone to do? And perhaps one of her friends is observant, as we both know women of taste can be. Women love to talk, they love to talk about each other, they especially love to say nasty things about each other. I really do think, Mr. Marlow, that in this instance, if I may say so, valor is the better part of discretion. I recall that Mrs. Marlow has a fine sense of humor. Perhaps she'll surprise you by laughing it off as a joke.”
“She loves this watch," I said. "She prefers it to the real one I bought from you.”
“She chose that one herself," he said. “You chose this one for her. Of course she prefers it. You could always choose her another.”
A sly salesman, Samuelson; I could spot that one coming a mile away. First, tell me there was no Rolex like this one, not to dream of buying another like it, practically refuse to sell me anything at all, then reverse gears and offer to solve my problem with a brand-new watch for the price of a mortgage. I had to admire his tactics.
He said, "Why let her know that you bought it knowingly? What if you bought it at a duty-free in Bangkok at what you thought was a reasonable price, and then I gave you the bad news? But you felt you absolutely must have a fine watch. We have a distinguished selection, I'm sure we can find something Mrs. Marlow would like equally.”
We were entering the decisive last stages of a sea battle, where two opposing ships-of-the-line square off and let their gun crews blast cannonade after cannonade at each other until someone's masts come down in a tangle. I said, “Well and good, but I want to leave the choice up to Sylvia. Not compound and confuse the problem.”
He said astutely, “What problem is there in receiving a lovely watch? With the same atmosphere as the one it replaces? I'm sure that if she's able to set them side-by-side, she will have no reluctance at distinguishing the finer of the two, a woman of her exquisite—”
I said, "You can't predict. Let's leave it at that. I appreciate your candor, Mr. Samuelson.”
"Not at all, Mr. Marlow. Glad to be of some small service."
That was when he tried to sweep Sylvia's watch nimbly away. But I caught him. And I made him put it together again, old battery and all.
We were to see The Marriage of Figaro the following evening, and fortunately Sylvia, doubtless not wishing to trouble me any further, did not telephone that night to inquire about her watch. I like to be on time; if she has any failing it is a tendency very occasionally to be late. At the opera house she managed to arrive, breathless, barely in time to give me a peck on the cheek and for us to slip into our usual seats before the lights went down. She asked about the watch just as the overture began. I made a playful librarian gesture of silence but could feel her question pressing my hand in hers. Then, at last, the curtain went up.
Mozart’s operas always seem to go by quickly. After only a rattling tune or two, it seemed, we had reached intermission.
I suggested we take a brief stroll outside. The fountain was geysering up and there were couples around it enjoying the sense of getting a little wet. Sylvia’s beauty seemed to me particularly poignant that night, shining in a short gold silk dress I had brought back once from Hong Kong. Perhaps it is only hindsight, but as we walked among the other people she seemed as evanescent as the singing we had heard and the arcing illuminated water.
I said, "Darling, I got some difficult news today. Not at the office. Personal. It's about your watch. Look, we were both a little suspicious when it stopped so suddenly."
I pulled it from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She only glanced at it an instant, then her eyes came back to my face. Instinctively, I am sorry to say, she buckled the watch back on.
"Surely it's only the battery?" she said.
"I wish it were," I said. "I wish it were."
By now she was looking at me curiously, one hand protectively over her wrist, as if I were trying to take the thing away from her.
"Samuelson has his doubts," I said. I frowned and took a deep sigh. "The truth is he's not sure it can be reliably repaired."
"What does that mean?"
Inside the opera house they were calling us back, blinking the lobby lights in that pantomime that always seems to me more urgent than any music. I said, "Let's not get into it now, we can talk about it in the next intermission."
"Tell me now," she said—rather crossly, I thought. Almost like a little child stamping its foot.
"Look," I said, "the upshot is that it's not really what it purports to be. It's a lemon. These things happen. And what's wrong with it can't be fixed with a new battery." I paused. "If it could be fixed I wouldn't be telling you this. Perhaps I should've paid more attention when I bought it. You've got to be on your toes in that part of the world and I was a bit doggy from all that travel, I guess. I saw it in one of those duty-free places and I thought you had to have it, and I didn't examine it closely enough."
She said, “But surely we can send it back, can't we? The company will have to do something, they have a lifetime guarantee—"
"Of course they do," I said soothingly. “With a new watch, anyway. That doesn't matter. What matters is what we are going to do about replacing it—look, we're going to miss the second act. We can discuss this later." I ushered her into the lobby, talking a mile a minute. "The short and long of it, I'm afraid, is that they haven't made that model for years. It's a collector’s watch, really. I've had Samuelson calling all over the country, to the top vintage dealers, with no luck. The fellow in Bangkok had only that one. I'm just a little worried that if we don't get lucky, you may have to choose yourself another Rolex. Even one from the same era. Ah, we made it," I said, as the lights went down, just in time.
All through the second act I felt her rubbing her wrist a little disconsolately. Otherwise she was taking the bad news passively and rather well, I thought. I enjoyed the second act much more than the first, though Sylvia kept up her rubbing.
I bought us both champagne at the next intermission. Sylvia went to the ladies’ room and when she came back she said wistfully, "A woman just complimented me on my watch. I don't care if it runs or not, it's the most handsome gift you've ever bought me."
I said, "No, you need to have a watch that works. The next one won't be a lemon, I promise."
That was when she glanced at it. Her eyes widened, and her smile followed instantaneously. She said so loudly that everyone around us could hear, “It's running again!"
I couldn't believe it. She held it up to my face—people glancing in our direction—and I saw the hand tick-ticking.
The worst kind of Oriental revenge, I thought. That watch was going to punish me for not hiring its countrymen. Sylvia was going on about having rubbed it like Aladdin's lamp, or having shaken it up, or something harebrained about blood circulation beneath the wrist activating it again. I managed to get her back to her seat and while she sat poised, renewed, attentive to Mozart, I let the music pass by and pondered what I was going to say.
There is no question of you wearing this wristwatch. The fault is mine. It can be spotted as a bastard a mile away. The fault is mine. You cannot wear it in public, it is against every standard I and my company have ever stood for. The fault is mine. I will gladly buy you another one, a real one nearly like it or a dozen. The fault is mine. You must throw that one away.
After the opera we went straight back to the apartment. I began to make my little speech. She was still rubbing her wrist. Her sense of triumph startled me.
I took the requisite deep breath. "I wasn't sure whether I should tell you," I said. “The fact is, Samuelson thinks it might be, well, a copy. A very good one, but a copy nevertheless."
“A copy? What do you mean?"
“A fake," I said.
"But William, all that money—”
"I'm sure I can get the money back. It'll mean some paperwork with the credit card people, but they usually back you up in these situations. I'm afraid I never presumed to know very much about wristwatches."
She stopped me cold. "It's not your fault," she said. "You were hoodwinked.”
"Taken in, let's say."
"I'm afraid," she said, "I'm not being very kind, am I? I'm so glad it's running again. You've never bought me anything that made me happier."
I said, "We don't know who made it, you know. Anyone could've made it."
"I don't care who made it. It's a beautiful watch and I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to wear it as long as it works."
I said, "Are you sure you should?"
She flared. "Why not?”
Keep calm, I thought. She'll listen to reason in a few days.
I said delicately, “It's a little embarrassing, that's all."
That was when she said it.
"You poor, dear fool," she said. “Did you really think I couldn't tell the difference?"
"What?" I said. "I don't believe you."
She was practically laughing. That was what stung me.
“What do you mean by that? You knew and didn’t tell me?”
"I didn't want to upset you," she said. “It was obvious, I could compare it with the other one easily.”
"You knew it wasn't real?"
"Right away." She laughed again.
"And you were going to go ahead and wear it anyway?"
I think I may have shouted. I could see Samuelson and that damned Thai vendor just behind her, chortling away.
She said, “Don't be an old woman. Of course I intend to wear it."
"People don't care," she snapped. "Only you care."
"My success has been built on the error of that assumption."
“‘Error’ is right,” she said.
And walked out of the room.
Six months have passed. Sylvia insists on wearing the watch everywhere. It is still running and she claims it keeps good time. She has refused the offer of a genuine one. Instead she has made me promise that, when next I am in the Far East, I will bring her back a duplicate or two to replace it should it ever stop again. I wonder if this is not a small price to pay for a young and attractive wife. Revelations, XIII?
Do not misunderstand me. It was not an error for me to marry a second time. It does strike me, though, as perhaps a lapse in sound judgment to expect another person to continue to live up to all one's personal ideals. In the end it doesn't surprise me that Sylvia would behave in such a way; I knew all about her and her origins before I married her. What surprises me is that she actually thought I couldn't tell the difference.
It began, you see, not as a simple deception but simply as a gift. I am too good a businessman not to know the limits of my own success and I take a modest delight in transcending them. At that time, at my age—fifty-three—I could afford to buy for my young second wife, Sylvia, anything she wanted. My company, mine and mine alone, specialized in handsome leather-bound and gilt-edged datebooks, notebooks, address books, memo books, etc. You have got to specialize to succeed big: Exodus, VI.
I wasn't surprised that the sudden rise of the pocket-size personal computer industry had hurt my business not at all, perhaps even encouraged it. Let the buzzards bicker all they want; my line is status, and there is no substitute for the fragrance of genuine morocco, which by the way comes nowadays from southeast Asia. No substitute, in other words, for the real thing, when it comes to status. In an endlessly perverse world, you see, status is the preferred form of truth.
This is scripture out of the N. T., from the Bible for All Businessmen, William Marlow Edition, not available to the general public. From Genesis came my belief in never missing a chance to create a better deal where before there was only darkness; no matter how thick the serpents lie on the ground, Eden may wait just around the corner. Say what you will of mistakes I made, at the end of the day my opponents and colleagues alike know me as a gentle man, grown portly of late, who does his own travelling and buying himself, by himself. The selling you can leave to lesser luminaries in a company; any fool can sell. It takes special genius to know how to buy.
I was on one of my bimonthly buying trips, and had finished three days of business in Singapore—a new contract with a smart young company that produced marbleized endpapers for me, quick to spot an opening as Chinese always are. Having planned a week’s stay, I decided on a surprise swing through Bangkok to investigate printing possibilities there. I don't and never did believe in resting, no matter what day of the week—Deuteronomy, XVII—and I'd never been to Bangkok. I telephoned Sylvia on the other side of the world at the summer house on the Jersey shore and left a message with our fat Barbadian housekeeper about the change of plans. After six years together, Sylvia was used to living on-the-fly and rather enjoyed, I think, my unpredictability.
Bangkok in July was sweltering. I don't need to tell you how heat dampens a man's spirit and leaves him open to temptation. I assured myself in one sticky afternoon I’d best stick with my printers in Hong Kong. The Thais smelled rancid to me: a charmless people too busy trying to make a penny on each side to see where the dollar profits lie. I went back to my hotel and had them change my ticket (Tokyo / Los Angeles / New York) to the next morning. I reminded them to confirm an aisle seat—Travels, XIV—then decided to go out for a walk before dinner. I knew Sylvia would ask me about Bangkok. She always teased me about avoiding the city out of worry about what mischief I might get myself into there.
"Every other man who goes there gets what he wants," she said. “Why shouldn't you? Just don't bring back anything dangerous.”
I wasn't interested in risking any diseases, but I also wasn't sure quite what to bring her instead. I have never been at ease choosing presents. It always seems a little amateurish; and you can easily end up wasting your time on items that aren't first-rate, you see. Still, I went for a walk. It wasn't far from the confines of my hotel, the famous one with a string quartet sawing wood in the lobby, to Patpong, the so-called Street of Sex.
At this point nearly everywhere reminds me of somewhere else. Patpong reminded me of New Orleans—less lascivious than I’d imagined, with little of the pure lust they advertise. I know how to buy; I know what pure lust is. The Thai girls with their long black eyes and their long black hair strode around in miniskirts and invoked me with their hellos, and clung to my arm for a friendly moment, or danced naked to deafening music in ground-floor bars with obscene names and stroboscopic lights where upstairs, no doubt, I could have absolutely anything I desired done to me. This much I saw from the street.
None of that fascinated me as much as the fact that Patpong’s tables and stalls were busy selling every imaginable brand-name fake by the thousands. Fake upon fake, from videos and cassettes to Chanel T-shirts and leather Gucci bags and Kenzo pocketbooks and Cartier watches. Not one of them the real McTavish. Most of Patpong’s clients weren’t desperate men but elderly tourists or American teenagers buying fake Levi's blue jeans or Ray-Ban sunglasses. And there was a real McDonald's on the corner whose antiseptic light made even the available girls look innocent. On a whim I had dinner there and eavesdropped—I'd have made a good spy—on a German trying to convince a slender local lovely to come away with him to Koh Samui for a week.
On a greater whim I finished my cheeseburger, walked ten yards along Patpong, and found myself bargaining over a fake Rolex watch for Sylvia.
My intention, you see, was to buy it simply as a joke. Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other and besides, I had bought her a very handsome gold and jeweled Rolex for our second anniversary for more than ten thousand dollars. I thought it would be rather a good joke to buy her a fake one.
The joke was that it was a beautiful watch. What caught my eye was the style: it seemed deliberately aged, perhaps thirty-five years old, squarish, mannish for a lady, with a tinted face and slant formal numbers, very distinguished, with sleek echos in it of the Art Deco style. I can't say why, but that wristwatch reminded me of Lauren Bacall and those old Bogart films. The watchband was cheap black plastic but even as I glanced over at the others, the watch leaped out at me like Sylvia herself from the table of heavy silver and gold men's Rolex and Omega and Bulova and Patek and Christian Dior imitations. I moved several around experimentally before the vendor pushed the one I wanted before me.
"Let's have a look at you," I said, and held it up and turned it this way and that. I put it back on the table.
"Not bad," I said. "Not much of a watchband, though. What will you take for it?"
His first price, nine hundred baht, was stratospheric.
“Nonsense,” I said, and turned on my heel. He pulled me back. "Just a moment," he said. “Best price." He stabbed away at his calculator and offered me a 5% reduction. "Don't waste my time," I told him, and walked away again. He pulled me back like a stagehand with a hook, told me about his family miseries, and knocked off another point or two. It took me ten minutes, but I chewed him down another forty percent to about eight dollars American, including a replacement leather watchband. I was so engaged in securing this wristwatch for Sylvia that it didn't occur to me look for one for myself.
"Beautiful watch, sah. Taiwan-made, not Hong Kong. Better."
"Don't be absurd. Better? It's a fake," I said.
“Yes, yes," he said, taking the money and counting it with skillful fingers. “But work always better in Taiwan. You wait and see. That why your Rolex more expensive than Hong Kong Rolex."
Oddly enough, it was the fellow in the plane beside me between Bangkok and Tokyo the next morning who confirmed that. It was one of those rumpled youngish men who seem to be perpetually travelling but whom you rarely see among the professionals in the front section. This made me think he might know what he was talking about.
I had taken the watch out and was having a good look at it, in the light of day and all that, and thinking: what a laugh Sylvia will have when I get home. Miriam would've been incensed, of course.
"Handsome watch," said the fellow. "What kind?"
"Rolex," I said.
"Can't beat that," he says. "May I?"
"Be my guest," I said, and handed it over. I let him look for a moment, debating whether to spoil the fun, and finally I asked, as if I weren't sure myself, “How old do you suppose she is?"
"That's a good one," he said. “It's harder to date a Rolex than you might expect. Because they keep ahead of everyone and yet remain classical in terms of style. I’d say—oh, late fifties. Am I warm?”
"Not even tepid," I said, taking the watch back.
“Guess what I paid," I said.
He flushed. Money embarrasses the young.
“I wouldn't presume—" he began.
“Presume away.”
“Nine? No, no,” he corrected himself. "I'll say eight thousand dollars.”
"Seven," I said. "Only seven.”
"In fact," I said conspiratorially, "That's a Taiwan Rolex. Not a Swiss one. Seven dollars. Think I overpaid?"
He took the watch back from me without asking, he was so astonished. He looked like someone about to blow a bubble. He made a careful examination, right down to the silver label and serial number on the back. He peered carefully at the lettering on the face. He shook his head. He said finally, "And we think we're going to beat those people at light industry? We don't have a chance."
"Now you're learning," I said.
He had, no doubt, spotted the ring on my finger. He said casually, "Do you think your wife will know the difference?"
"I'll tell her, of course."
“I wouldn't," he said.
Now it was my turn to be astonished. You may find this difficult to believe, but that possibility hadn't crossed my mind. As I said, Sylvia and I have no secrets from each other. Psalms, X.
"It'll amuse her to have one from Bangkok," I said. "Even if she never wears it. I picked her up a real one, a beauty, a few years back."
He shrugged. "None of my business. Still, that's an exceptionally handsome watch. It's an immaculate copy. No one will ever know the difference. Why spoil it for her?"
I dismissed this right away. Not long afterward he got off the plane in Tokyo, and I had both seats to myself for the duration of the flight. I alone must take responsibility for my decision. But I don't need to tell you that eighteen hours’ flying at thirty thousand feet can do strange things to a man’s judgment. Even in first class.
"Why, it's beautiful," Sylvia said, and laid it across her wrist. "You're outrageous, darling, you know you've already given me one."
"Not one like this," I said.
She had that triumphant glow on her lovely face that I always associate with a square-rigger under full sail; and her auburn hair swept back and shining like her eyes. At a moment like that I would always think that to be childless was not so important to her, that the security and luxury I had given her against the chaos of her own family was enough. Nobody meeting her would ever have guessed what she had made her way up from. Should I tell her the truth? I wondered. Would she see the joke? In this case I wasn't so sure she would. And, to tell you the truth, the watch really shone on her wrist, and I don't think it was the blouse or shoes she was wearing that day in particular. For once, I had got a present right.
I did not tell her the watch was a fake. She was very happy to have me home, and thanked me in her way, even though I could only stay for the weekend and was back in Manhattan on Monday morning.
Our arrangement in the summer was this: I spent four nights in the week at the apartment on East 53rd and then three nights with her out on the shore, unless we had tickets to a show or a concert, for my wife is a music-lover. In that case, she would come in. (I always enjoyed the opera, even before meeting Sylvia, but Miriam and I were not subscribers.) As it was, I did not see her from Monday morning until Friday evening, which was just as well as my sense of time was very confused from travelling halfway around the world and I wouldn't have been very good company. She came to pick me up at the breezy train station, as usual, but I sensed right away something amiss.
“I didn’t want to to trouble you in the city,” she said. “I'm sure it's nothing. It's the new Rolex. I’ve worn it every day, I'm mad about it. But it stopped yesterday. It's the strangest thing. The other one never has."
Mentally I cursed the Thais and all their progeny. How had I let myself be hoodwinked? Perhaps it was simply the quartz. I swallowed and made grumbling noises. That would've been the time to tell her—another opportunity that convenient might not come my way again. But I didn't seize it.
"Leave it to me," I said. "I'm sure it's only the battery. I'll have it replaced on Monday. You're coming in for Mozart on Tuesday, no? So you can wear it that night."
"Be sure to take it in to Samuelson’s," she said. "I don't want just any old dealer fiddling with it, they're not used to to dealing with watches of that quality."
"Don't worry," I said. You notice I didn't exactly agree.
I was relieved, anyway, that she hadn't taken it to some local fellow who might ask her where it came from and get openly suspicious. Down on the shore they have a tendency, I've noticed, to strike back against the outsiders who keep their bread buttered.
I wasn't about to take the watch into Samuelson, who'd sold me Sylvia's anniversary Rolex four years earlier and her necklace last winter and several other items in-between. After all, it was simply a question of replacing a battery. There was a large electronics store around the corner from my offices, run by a family of Koreans. They'd sold me camera equipment from time to time and I noticed they have a selection of digital watches. I went round right off the train first thing Monday morning.
“Stop already, eh?” said the young man at the watch counter when I handed over the Rolex. I didn't like his smile, it seemed to say: Serves you right for being rich enough to buy one of these.
With a tiny screwdriver he pried open the back, a little maliciously, I thought. I said sharply, "Be careful with that."
“Yeah, yeah, careful.”
He pulled the battery out with tweezers like a dentist removing a rotten filling. When he started to open a a package with a new battery, some impulse made me ask him to check the old one first. Over the years you develop instincts that you have to follow, even when behind them lies only bad news.
He nodded and attached my dead battery into some apparatus on the wall. He took it out with some surprise and set it before me on the counter. He said, “Battery okay, no problem,” and looked bored.
I hate the way these foreigners move in, out of their broken sweatshops and their choking cities, and not knowing the first thing about local business practices, they set themselves up and get around important regulations by collaborating with their cousins back home; and when you wander in for a little assistance in a catastrophe of their own people’s making they treat you disdainfully.
I said to this young man, “Pay attention. What’s wrong with it, then? If it isn't the battery?”
He shrugged and indicated the watch’s innards with his screwdriver. "Can be anything, maybe," he said.
We both waited for the other to speak. He skated the battery back and forth like a chess piece on the counter, called out something in his language to someone a counter over, then turned back, surprised I was still there. He said, "You want me to put the battery back?"
"That's exactly what I'd like.”
He did so swiftly, punched the back in place, then pushed the watch over to me. "No charge, sir," he said, and glanced away, waiting for me to leave, not willing to admit his own inadequacy. I did not thank him. I thought: Let him learn the hard way.
At the office everything was shipshape. I left a little early for lunch and went around to Samuelson's over on Madison. I thought: This has gone far enough. I felt a little apprehensive when I walked in, but another client, some woman, was leaving and Samuelson greeted me cheerfully, a grasshopper with his antennae on the alert and his hand out.
"Mr. Marlow, good to see you again, sir. You're looking very well these days."
"Probably this diet Mrs. Marlow's got me on.”
"They do know how to look after us, don't they? Now, what can I do for you this afternoon, Mr. Marlow?"
He wanted to demonstrate how well he remembered my name after not seeing me for over a year. Can't blame him for that—it's a technique I use myself. Labors, I. Names are everything.
I said, “It's about a watch I bought Mrs. Marlow overseas. It seems to be broken.”
“I'll be surprised if we can't take care of it. May I see the watch?"
This was an embarrassing moment for me, but I had steeled myself for it. I will credit Samuelson that his eyes betrayed little of what he must have thought.
He said gently, "It certainly doesn't seem to be running.” He cleared his throat. “May I, uh, ask you Mr. Marlow, how much you paid for this wristwatch?”
From the way he peered closely at the face I suspected he knew. I said, hitting the ball into his court, “About eight.”
I still held out hope he might say: Ah, eight thousand.
"Eight dollars?" he said. But there was no astonished surprise in his voice: he knew the watch was fake.
"That's right.”
His lips were pursed, not sealed. He did not look at me but at the watch as he spoke. "Hong Kong?"
"No, I bought it in Bangkok."
"I was referring to where it was made."
I paused. "I was told by the vendor that the best copies come from Taiwan. Like this one."
He shrugged. "Perhaps, Mr. Marlow. This one smells like Hong Kong to me." He handed it over. "Not a very good copy, I'm afraid."
"What's wrong with it?” I said, a little loudly I'm sure, then caught myself. "Apart from the fact it doesn't work."
"There's nothing wrong with it,” he said, with a little too much emphasis on the word for my taste. “For eight dollars it's probably not a bad buy. But it doesn't resemble a Rolex at all. Except for the fact it bears the name."
He saw I was not impressed with this vague speech.
He said, “Look at the label on the back. It's the wrong color and size and shape, to start with. It's not even well-affixed. The instant I saw that label, I knew your watch hadn't even come out of Taiwan, much less Switzerland. And it says on the face that it's a quartz watch. Rolex simply doesn't make quartz watches, period. Never have. Even more evident, it's not a sweep second hand. See how it ticks off the individual seconds? Rolex has never made a watch like that. And it's missing, at the base of the face, a certain word which you'll see immediately if you look at the Rolex you purchased here several years ago. And look at the quality of the crystal.” He tapped the glass and we listened to the clack of cheapness. He smiled sympathetically. "Do you want me to go on, Mr. Marlow? It's simply a question of professionalism, that's all. I spotted it immediately because it's my line of work to know the difference. You shouldn't feel bad. I have customers come in as you did, but after having paid several thousand dollars for a copy no better than yours. It's a shame.”
I could practically see his antennae waving in triumph. I don't like being made to feel like a fool anymore than the next man; plus I had my company's reputation to think of. When he was finished I said, “Well, what's to be done?”
"The watch is for Mrs. Marlow, of course.”
Was he suggesting I had a mistress? "Yes, of course.”
"Have you given it to her yet?”
"I'm afraid so. I had planned to give it to her as a gag, but she liked it so much—”
"Of course," he said soothingly. "And now you don't wish to tell her?"
“I don’t think so.”
He said delicately, “Perhaps if put the right way—”
"It's too much of an insult.”
"I see."
I said, "Is it an exact copy of a particular Rolex? Perhaps I could purchase a genuine one and exchange watchbands."
I thought my willingness to part with another king’s ransom might disarm him, but it had no effect. He shook his head slowly. "I'm afraid not. Let me show you something." He pulled a hefty book like a phone directory down from the shelf behind him and flipped through it. "There, you see what they've done? Those crafty fellows over in H. K. They've amalgamated two different designs, one from 1947, the other from 1933. Your Rolex really doesn't exist. It's like a pair of mismatched Siamese twins. Right part of the world, anyway.”
I had made the noble gesture, at least. I said, “And what about repairing this one?"
He said, "Normally, Mr. Marlow, as I'm sure you understand, we legitimate watch dealers absolutely refuse to repair copies. It’s bad for everyone, our customers in particular, if we do. It diminishes the fine watches we sell and it diminishes our clients.”
“Perhaps you could make an exception, Mr. Samuelson. I’ve been a very good customer of yours for many years, as two Mrs. Marlows would attest,” I said, steadily.
“One of our most faithful. And we appreciate that you came to us with this problem.” He sighed, for both our predicaments. “Let us at least see what’s wrong. Perhaps it’s only a battery. Any number of shops could install a fresh battery for you, if that’s the case.”
I did not tell him I had already been through this elsewhere. He opened the back expertly with a precision tool, but I noticed he didn't have one of those apparati for testing the battery. He slipped in a new one and said, "I did mention to you that a Rolex is never battery-powered, didn't I? Of course I did. Now let's see what difference a new battery makes.”
It didn't, naturally, make any difference at all. The watch resolutely refused to run.
"Oh, dear,” said Mr. Samuelson. “Just a moment.” He disappeared into a back room and returned with a strange band slipped over his skull with a sort of headlight built-in with, I assume, a magnifying glass. He looked like Jiminy Cricket in a space helmet. He opened the watch’s back again with his little tool and switched on his headlight and peered down.
“Oh, dear,” he repeated.
“What is it?” I dislike being at anyone’s mercy.
He switched off his hi-beam and removed his space helmet.
“Junk, Mr. Marlow,” he said. “Junk, plain and simple. I would suspect your watch wasn't made more than three months ago. And in Bangkok, I bet—it's not even of Hong Kong quality. It's got a lifetime of six months at most. There’s nothing to be done with it. Throw it out. I'll throw it out for you, if you like.”
He was capable of it, too, but I held onto the watchband. “Can't you save the face and replace the innards?”
"One can always save face, Mr. Marlow. We don't do that sort of work here. Besides, it's risky at best. Suppose you repair this watch. Your wife wears it. It's a handsome watch, we must admit this. We see why you bought it and why Mrs. Marlow, with her taste, enjoys wearing it. But supposing she shows it to one of her friends, as we both know women are prone to do? And perhaps one of her friends is observant, as we both know women of taste can be. Women love to talk, they love to talk about each other, they especially love to say nasty things about each other. I really do think, Mr. Marlow, that in this instance, if I may say so, valor is the better part of discretion. I recall that Mrs. Marlow has a fine sense of humor. Perhaps she'll surprise you by laughing it off as a joke.”
“She loves this watch," I said. "She prefers it to the real one I bought from you.”
“She chose that one herself," he said. “You chose this one for her. Of course she prefers it. You could always choose her another.”
A sly salesman, Samuelson; I could spot that one coming a mile away. First, tell me there was no Rolex like this one, not to dream of buying another like it, practically refuse to sell me anything at all, then reverse gears and offer to solve my problem with a brand-new watch for the price of a mortgage. I had to admire his tactics.
He said, "Why let her know that you bought it knowingly? What if you bought it at a duty-free in Bangkok at what you thought was a reasonable price, and then I gave you the bad news? But you felt you absolutely must have a fine watch. We have a distinguished selection, I'm sure we can find something Mrs. Marlow would like equally.”
We were entering the decisive last stages of a sea battle, where two opposing ships-of-the-line square off and let their gun crews blast cannonade after cannonade at each other until someone's masts come down in a tangle. I said, “Well and good, but I want to leave the choice up to Sylvia. Not compound and confuse the problem.”
He said astutely, “What problem is there in receiving a lovely watch? With the same atmosphere as the one it replaces? I'm sure that if she's able to set them side-by-side, she will have no reluctance at distinguishing the finer of the two, a woman of her exquisite—”
I said, "You can't predict. Let's leave it at that. I appreciate your candor, Mr. Samuelson.”
"Not at all, Mr. Marlow. Glad to be of some small service."
That was when he tried to sweep Sylvia's watch nimbly away. But I caught him. And I made him put it together again, old battery and all.
We were to see The Marriage of Figaro the following evening, and fortunately Sylvia, doubtless not wishing to trouble me any further, did not telephone that night to inquire about her watch. I like to be on time; if she has any failing it is a tendency very occasionally to be late. At the opera house she managed to arrive, breathless, barely in time to give me a peck on the cheek and for us to slip into our usual seats before the lights went down. She asked about the watch just as the overture began. I made a playful librarian gesture of silence but could feel her question pressing my hand in hers. Then, at last, the curtain went up.
Mozart’s operas always seem to go by quickly. After only a rattling tune or two, it seemed, we had reached intermission.
I suggested we take a brief stroll outside. The fountain was geysering up and there were couples around it enjoying the sense of getting a little wet. Sylvia’s beauty seemed to me particularly poignant that night, shining in a short gold silk dress I had brought back once from Hong Kong. Perhaps it is only hindsight, but as we walked among the other people she seemed as evanescent as the singing we had heard and the arcing illuminated water.
I said, "Darling, I got some difficult news today. Not at the office. Personal. It's about your watch. Look, we were both a little suspicious when it stopped so suddenly."
I pulled it from my jacket pocket and handed it to her. She only glanced at it an instant, then her eyes came back to my face. Instinctively, I am sorry to say, she buckled the watch back on.
"Surely it's only the battery?" she said.
"I wish it were," I said. "I wish it were."
By now she was looking at me curiously, one hand protectively over her wrist, as if I were trying to take the thing away from her.
"Samuelson has his doubts," I said. I frowned and took a deep sigh. "The truth is he's not sure it can be reliably repaired."
"What does that mean?"
Inside the opera house they were calling us back, blinking the lobby lights in that pantomime that always seems to me more urgent than any music. I said, "Let's not get into it now, we can talk about it in the next intermission."
"Tell me now," she said—rather crossly, I thought. Almost like a little child stamping its foot.
"Look," I said, "the upshot is that it's not really what it purports to be. It's a lemon. These things happen. And what's wrong with it can't be fixed with a new battery." I paused. "If it could be fixed I wouldn't be telling you this. Perhaps I should've paid more attention when I bought it. You've got to be on your toes in that part of the world and I was a bit doggy from all that travel, I guess. I saw it in one of those duty-free places and I thought you had to have it, and I didn't examine it closely enough."
She said, “But surely we can send it back, can't we? The company will have to do something, they have a lifetime guarantee—"
"Of course they do," I said soothingly. “With a new watch, anyway. That doesn't matter. What matters is what we are going to do about replacing it—look, we're going to miss the second act. We can discuss this later." I ushered her into the lobby, talking a mile a minute. "The short and long of it, I'm afraid, is that they haven't made that model for years. It's a collector’s watch, really. I've had Samuelson calling all over the country, to the top vintage dealers, with no luck. The fellow in Bangkok had only that one. I'm just a little worried that if we don't get lucky, you may have to choose yourself another Rolex. Even one from the same era. Ah, we made it," I said, as the lights went down, just in time.
All through the second act I felt her rubbing her wrist a little disconsolately. Otherwise she was taking the bad news passively and rather well, I thought. I enjoyed the second act much more than the first, though Sylvia kept up her rubbing.
I bought us both champagne at the next intermission. Sylvia went to the ladies’ room and when she came back she said wistfully, "A woman just complimented me on my watch. I don't care if it runs or not, it's the most handsome gift you've ever bought me."
I said, "No, you need to have a watch that works. The next one won't be a lemon, I promise."
That was when she glanced at it. Her eyes widened, and her smile followed instantaneously. She said so loudly that everyone around us could hear, “It's running again!"
I couldn't believe it. She held it up to my face—people glancing in our direction—and I saw the hand tick-ticking.
The worst kind of Oriental revenge, I thought. That watch was going to punish me for not hiring its countrymen. Sylvia was going on about having rubbed it like Aladdin's lamp, or having shaken it up, or something harebrained about blood circulation beneath the wrist activating it again. I managed to get her back to her seat and while she sat poised, renewed, attentive to Mozart, I let the music pass by and pondered what I was going to say.
There is no question of you wearing this wristwatch. The fault is mine. It can be spotted as a bastard a mile away. The fault is mine. You cannot wear it in public, it is against every standard I and my company have ever stood for. The fault is mine. I will gladly buy you another one, a real one nearly like it or a dozen. The fault is mine. You must throw that one away.
After the opera we went straight back to the apartment. I began to make my little speech. She was still rubbing her wrist. Her sense of triumph startled me.
I took the requisite deep breath. "I wasn't sure whether I should tell you," I said. “The fact is, Samuelson thinks it might be, well, a copy. A very good one, but a copy nevertheless."
“A copy? What do you mean?"
“A fake," I said.
"But William, all that money—”
"I'm sure I can get the money back. It'll mean some paperwork with the credit card people, but they usually back you up in these situations. I'm afraid I never presumed to know very much about wristwatches."
She stopped me cold. "It's not your fault," she said. "You were hoodwinked.”
"Taken in, let's say."
"I'm afraid," she said, "I'm not being very kind, am I? I'm so glad it's running again. You've never bought me anything that made me happier."
I said, "We don't know who made it, you know. Anyone could've made it."
"I don't care who made it. It's a beautiful watch and I don't care what anyone says, I'm going to wear it as long as it works."
I said, "Are you sure you should?"
She flared. "Why not?”
Keep calm, I thought. She'll listen to reason in a few days.
I said delicately, “It's a little embarrassing, that's all."
That was when she said it.
"You poor, dear fool," she said. “Did you really think I couldn't tell the difference?"
"What?" I said. "I don't believe you."
She was practically laughing. That was what stung me.
“What do you mean by that? You knew and didn’t tell me?”
"I didn't want to upset you," she said. “It was obvious, I could compare it with the other one easily.”
"You knew it wasn't real?"
"Right away." She laughed again.
"And you were going to go ahead and wear it anyway?"
I think I may have shouted. I could see Samuelson and that damned Thai vendor just behind her, chortling away.
She said, “Don't be an old woman. Of course I intend to wear it."
"People don't care," she snapped. "Only you care."
"My success has been built on the error of that assumption."
“‘Error’ is right,” she said.
And walked out of the room.
Six months have passed. Sylvia insists on wearing the watch everywhere. It is still running and she claims it keeps good time. She has refused the offer of a genuine one. Instead she has made me promise that, when next I am in the Far East, I will bring her back a duplicate or two to replace it should it ever stop again. I wonder if this is not a small price to pay for a young and attractive wife. Revelations, XIII?
Do not misunderstand me. It was not an error for me to marry a second time. It does strike me, though, as perhaps a lapse in sound judgment to expect another person to continue to live up to all one's personal ideals. In the end it doesn't surprise me that Sylvia would behave in such a way; I knew all about her and her origins before I married her. What surprises me is that she actually thought I couldn't tell the difference.
Saturday, May 8, 1993
Kraków
I wrote this for Gourmet in May 1993. (The previous autumn, for just over six electrifying weeks, at my wonderful house in Kyrenia, Turkish Cyprus, I'd finally succeeded in writing a complete first draft of The Polish Lover, a short novel whose structure had troubled me for years. It was the most autobiographical of my novels, and ushered in the rest. My third book published, my first sold.) So Poland was much on my mind in those days.
Early one Kraków evening this spring, I was sitting in an outdoor café, in an enclosed courtyard just off the main square. Kraków has a richer café life than any other Polish city; it is a tradition here to while away easy hours at dozens of cafés, sipping coffee, sampling pastries, reading, talking, dreaming. This particular café's fountain ceased while a woman singer and her accordionist played. Next to me three girls sat sipping coffee and a bony young man in jeans came up and politely asked if he could read them poems. They listened courteously, amused, and just when he finished, the applause for the musicians coincided—had he timed it that way?—as applause for his poetry.
In Poland today all the poetry making itself heard at last seems a result of lucky timing.
Kraków’s poetry had been less bold, more subdued, when I was here 1985. It was winter, and the magnificent medieval city was wrapped in fog and a kind of ashen snow which owed as much to pollution from nearby factories as to the heavens. The people, too, seemed fogbound and brooding, waiting for a profound change in the political weather that seemed it might never come—not in their lifetimes nor those of their children.
This May I went back to see how Kraków had blossomed with the unexpected liberation from the Orwellian nightmare. Or come back into its own; for to many Kraków is as great a treasure as Venice. (UNESCO designated it one of the world’s twelve most significant historic sites.) The old city, the Stare Miasto, has a completeness and antique grace probably unmatched in Eastern Europe—about four square miles of Renaissance, Baroque, and Gothic houses and monuments, along with seventy-two churches, the largest medieval square on the continent, and one of the grandest royal palaces. Kraków was the capital of Poland for five and a half centuries, through the end of the “Golden” 16th century, and it has steadfastly remained the nation's spiritual and cultural heart, right through the turmoil of the last two centuries. (Nearly all Poland's kings are buried here, and many of her poets.) In the recent decade of Solidarity, Kraków's communist-era steelworks suburb, the massive Nowa Huta (New Foundry), became one of the centers of uprising.
A Polish visit seems to consist of lucky accidental meetings. In another café I fell into conversation with a Kraków-born, now Canadian financier who’d defected twenty years earlier and was at last back on business. He told me,"Kraków is a strange, unique place, like a combination of Vienna, Rome, and Budapest—walk in the middle of the night and the streets feel old, solid, and calm—and almost mystical. You know, during the communist years of government parcelled out money for ‘cultural support’ all over the country. To Kraków they gave zero, nothing. They didn't have to. This city is different—its people were too intellectual to be manipulated like common workers or farmers. They never gave in."
In spring all Kraków was out strolling the Planty, the narrow belt of park that surrounds the old city—Poles always seem to be walking, not stuck in offices. Though Kraków managed to survive the Nazis without being bombed once, in nearly every other century it has endured attack after attack. Just past my hotel, entering the old city at the corner of Florianska Street I found the 19th and 20th century parts of the city confronting the medieval in the form of old city walls, an impressive series of turreted 15th century battlements known as the Gate of Glory. Back then the city was double walled, with a broad moat, seven gates, and forty-seven towers—with good reason, for during the Middle Ages alone, Tartar hordes attacked Kraków 91 times, followed by Germans, Russians, Cossacks, Turks, and Swedes. Several medieval towers still stand, bearing their traditional names: the Haberdashers’, the Carpenters’, the Joiners’.
The city grew up around the 8th century by the banks of Wisla (Vistula) River along important trade routes, and became the capital in 1038. In the 14th century King Kazimierz magnified its importance with two acts: the founding of the university, and giving Jews the right to live in Poland. (The once-Jewish quarter of the city was named after him.) Always more worldly, stylish, intellectual, and culturally adept than Warsaw, for several centuries Kraków became a prominent center of culture and learning in Europe; Montaigne spoke of it as lying between Athens and Rome. Its Jagiellonian University (whose most famous student was Copernicus) could attract students from Germany, Italy, England, and France. Today the oldest university in Poland, around it prestigious fine arts, music, polytechnic, and mining academies have grown up, and Kraków still has much of the feel of a medieval university town, a center of learning and argument and art. The late Tadeusz Kantor operated his avant-garde theater company from Kraków; and the renowned composer Krzysztof Penderecki lives here, along with the science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem; diverse arts festivals are frequent.
After the capital was moved to Warsaw in 1596, and Kraków was sacked by invading Swedes in the mid-17th century, the city began a steady commercial decline. Incorporated into the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, it enjoyed an artistic and intellectual revival around the turn-of-the-century, located politically and artistically around the university. (Joseph Conrad spent his childhood in Kraków.) At that time the "Queen of Poland" was actually the Virgin Mary; the partitioned nation lived on officially as a whole only in the Church.
Poland's losses in the Second World War are well-known—one Pole in five died, and the Nazis did their best to erase utterly Warsaw. Though most of Kraków’s architecture survived, its human losses were enormous and the damage impossible to assess. All schools, at every level, were closed for five years. University professors, doctors, writers, artists, architects, priests, or government officials were automatically sent to death camps and their crematoriums. The Academy lost seventy members, murdered by the Nazis; a fifth of Kraków's teachers were deported and killed, and a quarter of the writers' union. Even Chopin's music was banned from performance.
Old Kraków is, really, a living architectural museum (despite the ecological ravage of Soviet-era factories). I have heard its proportions put at 25% Gothic, 30% Baroque, and 40% Renaissance. It contains a number of museums, the most remarkable being the collection of the 18th-century Princess Izabella of the Czartoryski family, who were collectors on a grand scale throughout Europe for generations. The Czartoryski Palace, near the Gate of Glory, contains an Ottoman tent and chess sets, 17th century tapestries, numerous portraits and Spanish chests; old armor, swords, shields, spears, cannon, and other fighting equipment from several countries, including a wide selection of Ottoman cavalry battle gear captured at the Battle of Vienna; ornate European and Oriental glassware; contemporary miniatures of Rousseau, Napoleon, and Ben Franklin; memorabilia of the Polish kings, ancient pottery, gilded sofas, and Polish porcelain. Best of all are a hall of religious paintings from the early 14th century on, a gloriously incandescent Leonardo (Lady Holding an Ermine), and a Rembrandt (Landscape with the Good Samaritan).
I made a leisurely walk down Florianska Street my morning ritual. There was always a group of five or six Gypsy musicians—violin, guitar, accordion—enjoying a cigarette and a plaintive tune and basking in the sunlight. A few art students had hung hundreds of paintings on the rough stone walls. One young man was selling earrings ingeniously made from bits of broken Soviet watches, a very Polish commentary on the current situation.
“They break, we make,” he said.
The Jama Michalika at 45 Florianska Street—since 1895, one of the most culturally important coffee-houses of Europe—is my ideal of an indoor café: a cavernous sanctuary in dark wood and comfortable armchairs, with three large but intimate rooms of progressively less light, crowded with paintings by illustrious former patrons, many of them young painters from the nearby Academy of Fine Arts who couldn’t afford to pay their bill and swapped art for confectionery. Beneath the chandeliers and the turn-of-the-century caricatures and the glass-cased, handmade marionettes, comforted by the moderately risqué stained-glass windows, in shadowy corners enlightened by inexhaustible pastry, eternal tea, and unending coffee with cream or chocolate, attended by the patient adoring waitresses, you can sit for hours and let the world recede.
The Rynek Glowny is one of those rare European squares which has been allowed to carry on all the classic functions of a square. Flagstoned, ordered by dignified houses and a monumental church, it draws you inevitably and absorbs your days. Because cars are all but forbidden in the Old City, the Rynek still belongs to people on foot, and partly because the development of the rest of Kraków has been slow, the square has never lost its status; it hasn't yet been superseded by the sprawl or ambiguity of a modern city’s growth.
Dating from 1257, in many ways the square remains medieval—it hasn't given way yet to Venetian-style tourist-touts or postcard vendors. (In early morning you can watch flower-sellers out pumping water by hand, as they have for centuries.) Every Pole can tell you that here the nationalist leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko made his call for unity and independence in 1794 when the country was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Most of all, the Rynek attracts people, which is the first purpose of a square. The square has everything: underground Italian restaurants, cabarets and theaters, a jazz club, bookstores, music shops, leather and clothing stores, even a Chanel boutique nearby. Here all Kraków sooner or later passes, shops, and congregates, from before dawn until late at night, when the last nightclub, theater, or café shuts.
The Market Square, irregular in shape, is dominated by the long central Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), built during the Renaissance: a rectangular arcade of pale yellow stone and brick of symmetrical balconies, turrets, Moorish arches, columns, and sculpted heads looking down on the bustling flower-carts below. Arrayed on its ground floor are cafés and stalls of wood-, leather- and woolen-goods sellers. Upstairs is a museum of 19th-century Polish art, useful because one sees easily in the old paintings how little the square has changed. Nearby a weathered dark clock tower rises, all that remains of an old municipal hall, with a satirical theater downstairs.
For me the most astonishing element of the “new” Poland is the explosion of art galleries everywhere. Kraków had at least a dozen art galleries worth exploring; it is difficult to believe that all these artists had, of course, nowhere to sell their work until the last couple of years. The widest selection of contemporary art I saw was at Galeria Art in Warsaw (ul. Krakówskie Przedmiescie 15/17), but in combination all Kraków’s galleries could rival it. They aren't difficult to find, but good starting points are Piano Noble at # 33 on the main square and Jan Fejkiel Gallery at #36 Florianska. For the best selection of local “naive” woodcarvings and religious figurines, try Galeria Camelot, ul. Tomasza 17.
Poland has had a richness of artists in many mediums for some time, but until recently the principal medium of public expression that was permitted was its poster art for films and theater—the most exciting in Europe for thirty years and equal to Paris’ at the turn-of-the-century. The “extra” posters from a national collection are available in Kraków at the Galeria Plakatu, ul. Stolarska 8-10, (and also at a similar gallery in the square of Warsaw’s Old City).
St. Mary's, on the Market Square, is to my mind one of the most magnificent Gothic churches in Europe; a Polish architect assured me it was the only Gothic church on the continent with no flying buttresses. In any case, its symbolic importance to Poles is incalculable. Founded in 1222, later destroyed by the Tartars, and rebuilt beginning in 1355, from the outside its appearance is appropriately military, with uneven towers topped with spires like raised spears, and even a crown and helmet. Every Polish schoolchild knows the story behind the trumpeter who, from the tallest tower, heralds each hour with a plaintive broken-off solo. This echoes the legendary 13th-century herald who, warning of a Tartar invasion, received an arrow in the throat in mid-note. For a country so often (and recently) invaded, condemned by location to be forever a buffer state, the story has enormous resonance.
To walk into St. Mary's is like entering a shadowy mountain pass with sunlight breaking through at the far end. Little inside is later than the 15th century: dark Gothic pockets of stone, carved wood, bursts of color in 500-year-old stained glass, black chandeliers, vaulting ceilings of blue and gold. All is faded, but built to withstand time. Arches upon arches culminate in the high altar, where at noon every day a nun armed with a long poker opens the dark triptych cover to reveal panel upon panel in gilded and ornately sculpted wood. (It is closed at six each evening.)
The Roman Catholic Church created in many ways the nation’s soul back in the Middle Ages, and much of the power of that initial creation still survives as a living force at St. Mary’s. About 90% of Poles are Catholic, and during the communist years the Church was the only national organization that didn’t have Soviet advisers attached to it. (Pope John Paul II was formerly Archbishop of Kraków.) And yet in the light of today’s independence, the Church’s power may be slightly on the wane, at least to a young generation; with freedom, it has lost one of its roles. A fashionable young woman running an art gallery remarked to me that the Church was clinging so tightly to its power these days that it was in danger of becoming yet another form of indoctrination. This view was echoed by several other young Poles I spoke to—perhaps part of the Polish tendency to argue with whatever seems to represent the established order at the time.
One evening after dinner I went to the Piwnica Pod Baranami in the corner building of a related name, (Palac pod Baranami, which means Palace Under the Rams—a center for tickets to many cultural events and a good stop in planning one’s evening out). Three decades old, the theater-cabaret, thought by many the finest in Poland, was underground, with still a slightly dissenting university-pranks air about it, held in a room like a medieval castle cellar packed to overflowing. There were songs, bits of inverted theater, jokes, poetry. Because I understood little of it I kept wandering out to the bar, where a few dozen people had come to drink and drink in the underground ambience of the place. Everything verbal was lost on me, since I don’t speak Polish, but I recommend it as a quick entry into a very particular and important aspect of the local culture—to see Cracovians being their inventive, sociable selves, and in the late 20th century. (The cabaret performances take place Thursday and Saturday nights around 10 p.m., but get there at least a half hour earlier for good seats.)
Erasmus called Poland “the country of the scholars,” and Kraków’s feel is still very much that of a university town. Many of those cafés flourish because there are so many young people to read and argue in them, and those nearer the university have a different mood than those on the square. “What I love about Kraków,” a Renaissance literature student told me, “is that so many cafés are still underground.” Her pun was deliberate.
I spent nearly an hour visiting the Jagiellonian University collection, in the Gothic-era Collegium Maius building, five minutes’ walk from the square. (You need to book a place on a guided tour in the morning, or better, a day before.) The great treasure here is a fairly small 16th-century clock in the shape of a world globe, the first to indicate America, “a newly discovered land,” small and right where it should be, next to Madagascar.
I hired a taxi for two unrelated expeditions one afternoon, through a countryside of fields and small brick-and-stone houses with slant roofs, rather like a poor version of Italy. It was only twenty-odd miles from Kraków to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps where about four million people from over twenty European nations were murdered, two and a half million of them Jews. For personal reasons I had intended not to go; I am grateful I went, but I suggest that people think through carefully whether they truly want the experience or not. I will not do it the indignity of a brief description other than to say that to visit those two vast machines of death is the psychological equivalent of walking into a blowtorch. Nobody can see them and emerge unchanged.
The other expedition, as a kind of spiritual antidote, was to the salt mines at Wieliczka, only nine miles south of Kraków. The property of the kings of Poland, they have been in operation since the end of the 13th century. An 18th-century wag called them “as remarkable as the Pyramids and more useful”; they are surely one of the man-made wonders of the world. The mines reach 1200 feet underground, but a visitor descends on foot only some sixty-odd floors and emerges into wide and airy corridor upon corridor of what seems a soft gray stone—in fact salt. Here and there run tracks horses once pulled carriages of salt. More astonishing are the worried steps cut into the cavern-walls where, until the end of the 19th century, the salt was extracted by hammer and pick and carried up on men’s backs. Now it’s extracted by chemical solutions and mechanically lifted to the surface.
But one doesn’t go to this trouble to visit a mine. What these contain, unforgettably, are chapels going back three hundred years cut out of the salt walls so the fervent miners could worship every day. Here are larger-than-life statues of saints, kings, and elves, all carved by ordinary miners out of the dark gray salt, and so unexpected they take on the strangeness of a science-fiction film. These culminate, at nearly 400 feet underground, in an enormous high-ceilinged chapel, cathedral-like in scale, hung with three chandeliers of translucent salt and lined with sculpted statues and murals: the Nativity, the Last Supper, the passage from Bethlehem. The entire chapel was carved by three miners over the course of forty-five years, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. No photographs can do it justice: it must be seen to be believed.
Led on a walking tour by a small and detailed guidebook, I spent another afternoon exploring the Kazimierz, formerly the Jewish quarter of Kraków, in search of echoes of one side of my family heritage. It lies just south of the Wawel Castle, an easy walk from the Old City. Before the war there were about seventy thousand Jews here; most were killed by the Nazis, and fewer than two hundred Jews remain in Kraków now, with only one of the several surviving synagogues still active—the Remuh, with one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Despite my guidebook’s enthusiasm, I sadly found little evocative of the community that flourished here once, and I considered it a wasted afternoon, though others might find more. For somebody intent on touching as much of that heritage as possible, the place to visit is the 15th-century Old Synagogue on Szeroka Street, now a careful museum of the history and culture of Kraków’s Jews. Inquire about its opening days and hours first, which vary according to season.
If any one building is the heart of the Polish nation, which at times over the centuries has ceased to exist as a cartographical entity, it is Wawel Hill, with its castle and cathedral, essentially unchanged for five centuries and beneath which many of Poland’s poets and monarchs are buried. Now they are a museum, and their importance can be gleaned from the fact that there are always even more Polish visitors than foreigners. The castle part of the museum is more palace than fortress, of a stately architecture outside and a royal splendor inside. The Polish kings ruled from here from the 11th to 16th centuries, and much remains, despite those innumerable invasions—the Swedes burned it, the Russians occupied it, the Prussians plundered it, and the Austrians tried to demolish it. The worst indignity was its use as seat of the Nazi General Government from 1939 to 1945—and yet this is probably what saved Kraków from the architectural destruction that Warsaw received. Here are room after room of rare tapestries, gilded and painted scenic ceilings, lavish Baroque furniture, and even a Renaissance trio filling one room with 16th- and 17th-century music.
The 14th-century Cathedral—“the sanctuary of the nation” as the Polish Pope has said—seems crammed with history, austere, dignified, dark, and noble. Here are enormous tapestries, steep and muscular stone columns; silver and marble sarcophagi; a sense of deep determination, but not the open exultation of St. Mary’s. All but four of Poland’s forty-five monarchs are entombed in the many side chapels, near illuminated texts and treasured royal artifacts. From the tower above is the finest view of Kraków; in the crypts below the tombs of the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
In any other country this might seem mostly irrelevant to a visiting foreigner. In Kraków, to wander alongside little Polish schoolchildren, to see the reverence with which they are instructed in the distant past and the recent, that experience seems to sum up the passion and determination that lies beneath the vibrant poetry and life of all those cafés, the strollers in that square, the poetry in those preserved houses which have waited too many generations to be owned and looked after by their own people.
Early one Kraków evening this spring, I was sitting in an outdoor café, in an enclosed courtyard just off the main square. Kraków has a richer café life than any other Polish city; it is a tradition here to while away easy hours at dozens of cafés, sipping coffee, sampling pastries, reading, talking, dreaming. This particular café's fountain ceased while a woman singer and her accordionist played. Next to me three girls sat sipping coffee and a bony young man in jeans came up and politely asked if he could read them poems. They listened courteously, amused, and just when he finished, the applause for the musicians coincided—had he timed it that way?—as applause for his poetry.
In Poland today all the poetry making itself heard at last seems a result of lucky timing.
Kraków’s poetry had been less bold, more subdued, when I was here 1985. It was winter, and the magnificent medieval city was wrapped in fog and a kind of ashen snow which owed as much to pollution from nearby factories as to the heavens. The people, too, seemed fogbound and brooding, waiting for a profound change in the political weather that seemed it might never come—not in their lifetimes nor those of their children.
This May I went back to see how Kraków had blossomed with the unexpected liberation from the Orwellian nightmare. Or come back into its own; for to many Kraków is as great a treasure as Venice. (UNESCO designated it one of the world’s twelve most significant historic sites.) The old city, the Stare Miasto, has a completeness and antique grace probably unmatched in Eastern Europe—about four square miles of Renaissance, Baroque, and Gothic houses and monuments, along with seventy-two churches, the largest medieval square on the continent, and one of the grandest royal palaces. Kraków was the capital of Poland for five and a half centuries, through the end of the “Golden” 16th century, and it has steadfastly remained the nation's spiritual and cultural heart, right through the turmoil of the last two centuries. (Nearly all Poland's kings are buried here, and many of her poets.) In the recent decade of Solidarity, Kraków's communist-era steelworks suburb, the massive Nowa Huta (New Foundry), became one of the centers of uprising.
A Polish visit seems to consist of lucky accidental meetings. In another café I fell into conversation with a Kraków-born, now Canadian financier who’d defected twenty years earlier and was at last back on business. He told me,"Kraków is a strange, unique place, like a combination of Vienna, Rome, and Budapest—walk in the middle of the night and the streets feel old, solid, and calm—and almost mystical. You know, during the communist years of government parcelled out money for ‘cultural support’ all over the country. To Kraków they gave zero, nothing. They didn't have to. This city is different—its people were too intellectual to be manipulated like common workers or farmers. They never gave in."
In spring all Kraków was out strolling the Planty, the narrow belt of park that surrounds the old city—Poles always seem to be walking, not stuck in offices. Though Kraków managed to survive the Nazis without being bombed once, in nearly every other century it has endured attack after attack. Just past my hotel, entering the old city at the corner of Florianska Street I found the 19th and 20th century parts of the city confronting the medieval in the form of old city walls, an impressive series of turreted 15th century battlements known as the Gate of Glory. Back then the city was double walled, with a broad moat, seven gates, and forty-seven towers—with good reason, for during the Middle Ages alone, Tartar hordes attacked Kraków 91 times, followed by Germans, Russians, Cossacks, Turks, and Swedes. Several medieval towers still stand, bearing their traditional names: the Haberdashers’, the Carpenters’, the Joiners’.
The city grew up around the 8th century by the banks of Wisla (Vistula) River along important trade routes, and became the capital in 1038. In the 14th century King Kazimierz magnified its importance with two acts: the founding of the university, and giving Jews the right to live in Poland. (The once-Jewish quarter of the city was named after him.) Always more worldly, stylish, intellectual, and culturally adept than Warsaw, for several centuries Kraków became a prominent center of culture and learning in Europe; Montaigne spoke of it as lying between Athens and Rome. Its Jagiellonian University (whose most famous student was Copernicus) could attract students from Germany, Italy, England, and France. Today the oldest university in Poland, around it prestigious fine arts, music, polytechnic, and mining academies have grown up, and Kraków still has much of the feel of a medieval university town, a center of learning and argument and art. The late Tadeusz Kantor operated his avant-garde theater company from Kraków; and the renowned composer Krzysztof Penderecki lives here, along with the science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem; diverse arts festivals are frequent.
After the capital was moved to Warsaw in 1596, and Kraków was sacked by invading Swedes in the mid-17th century, the city began a steady commercial decline. Incorporated into the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, it enjoyed an artistic and intellectual revival around the turn-of-the-century, located politically and artistically around the university. (Joseph Conrad spent his childhood in Kraków.) At that time the "Queen of Poland" was actually the Virgin Mary; the partitioned nation lived on officially as a whole only in the Church.
Poland's losses in the Second World War are well-known—one Pole in five died, and the Nazis did their best to erase utterly Warsaw. Though most of Kraków’s architecture survived, its human losses were enormous and the damage impossible to assess. All schools, at every level, were closed for five years. University professors, doctors, writers, artists, architects, priests, or government officials were automatically sent to death camps and their crematoriums. The Academy lost seventy members, murdered by the Nazis; a fifth of Kraków's teachers were deported and killed, and a quarter of the writers' union. Even Chopin's music was banned from performance.
Old Kraków is, really, a living architectural museum (despite the ecological ravage of Soviet-era factories). I have heard its proportions put at 25% Gothic, 30% Baroque, and 40% Renaissance. It contains a number of museums, the most remarkable being the collection of the 18th-century Princess Izabella of the Czartoryski family, who were collectors on a grand scale throughout Europe for generations. The Czartoryski Palace, near the Gate of Glory, contains an Ottoman tent and chess sets, 17th century tapestries, numerous portraits and Spanish chests; old armor, swords, shields, spears, cannon, and other fighting equipment from several countries, including a wide selection of Ottoman cavalry battle gear captured at the Battle of Vienna; ornate European and Oriental glassware; contemporary miniatures of Rousseau, Napoleon, and Ben Franklin; memorabilia of the Polish kings, ancient pottery, gilded sofas, and Polish porcelain. Best of all are a hall of religious paintings from the early 14th century on, a gloriously incandescent Leonardo (Lady Holding an Ermine), and a Rembrandt (Landscape with the Good Samaritan).
I made a leisurely walk down Florianska Street my morning ritual. There was always a group of five or six Gypsy musicians—violin, guitar, accordion—enjoying a cigarette and a plaintive tune and basking in the sunlight. A few art students had hung hundreds of paintings on the rough stone walls. One young man was selling earrings ingeniously made from bits of broken Soviet watches, a very Polish commentary on the current situation.
“They break, we make,” he said.
The Jama Michalika at 45 Florianska Street—since 1895, one of the most culturally important coffee-houses of Europe—is my ideal of an indoor café: a cavernous sanctuary in dark wood and comfortable armchairs, with three large but intimate rooms of progressively less light, crowded with paintings by illustrious former patrons, many of them young painters from the nearby Academy of Fine Arts who couldn’t afford to pay their bill and swapped art for confectionery. Beneath the chandeliers and the turn-of-the-century caricatures and the glass-cased, handmade marionettes, comforted by the moderately risqué stained-glass windows, in shadowy corners enlightened by inexhaustible pastry, eternal tea, and unending coffee with cream or chocolate, attended by the patient adoring waitresses, you can sit for hours and let the world recede.
The Rynek Glowny is one of those rare European squares which has been allowed to carry on all the classic functions of a square. Flagstoned, ordered by dignified houses and a monumental church, it draws you inevitably and absorbs your days. Because cars are all but forbidden in the Old City, the Rynek still belongs to people on foot, and partly because the development of the rest of Kraków has been slow, the square has never lost its status; it hasn't yet been superseded by the sprawl or ambiguity of a modern city’s growth.
Dating from 1257, in many ways the square remains medieval—it hasn't given way yet to Venetian-style tourist-touts or postcard vendors. (In early morning you can watch flower-sellers out pumping water by hand, as they have for centuries.) Every Pole can tell you that here the nationalist leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko made his call for unity and independence in 1794 when the country was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Most of all, the Rynek attracts people, which is the first purpose of a square. The square has everything: underground Italian restaurants, cabarets and theaters, a jazz club, bookstores, music shops, leather and clothing stores, even a Chanel boutique nearby. Here all Kraków sooner or later passes, shops, and congregates, from before dawn until late at night, when the last nightclub, theater, or café shuts.
The Market Square, irregular in shape, is dominated by the long central Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), built during the Renaissance: a rectangular arcade of pale yellow stone and brick of symmetrical balconies, turrets, Moorish arches, columns, and sculpted heads looking down on the bustling flower-carts below. Arrayed on its ground floor are cafés and stalls of wood-, leather- and woolen-goods sellers. Upstairs is a museum of 19th-century Polish art, useful because one sees easily in the old paintings how little the square has changed. Nearby a weathered dark clock tower rises, all that remains of an old municipal hall, with a satirical theater downstairs.
For me the most astonishing element of the “new” Poland is the explosion of art galleries everywhere. Kraków had at least a dozen art galleries worth exploring; it is difficult to believe that all these artists had, of course, nowhere to sell their work until the last couple of years. The widest selection of contemporary art I saw was at Galeria Art in Warsaw (ul. Krakówskie Przedmiescie 15/17), but in combination all Kraków’s galleries could rival it. They aren't difficult to find, but good starting points are Piano Noble at # 33 on the main square and Jan Fejkiel Gallery at #36 Florianska. For the best selection of local “naive” woodcarvings and religious figurines, try Galeria Camelot, ul. Tomasza 17.
Poland has had a richness of artists in many mediums for some time, but until recently the principal medium of public expression that was permitted was its poster art for films and theater—the most exciting in Europe for thirty years and equal to Paris’ at the turn-of-the-century. The “extra” posters from a national collection are available in Kraków at the Galeria Plakatu, ul. Stolarska 8-10, (and also at a similar gallery in the square of Warsaw’s Old City).
St. Mary's, on the Market Square, is to my mind one of the most magnificent Gothic churches in Europe; a Polish architect assured me it was the only Gothic church on the continent with no flying buttresses. In any case, its symbolic importance to Poles is incalculable. Founded in 1222, later destroyed by the Tartars, and rebuilt beginning in 1355, from the outside its appearance is appropriately military, with uneven towers topped with spires like raised spears, and even a crown and helmet. Every Polish schoolchild knows the story behind the trumpeter who, from the tallest tower, heralds each hour with a plaintive broken-off solo. This echoes the legendary 13th-century herald who, warning of a Tartar invasion, received an arrow in the throat in mid-note. For a country so often (and recently) invaded, condemned by location to be forever a buffer state, the story has enormous resonance.
To walk into St. Mary's is like entering a shadowy mountain pass with sunlight breaking through at the far end. Little inside is later than the 15th century: dark Gothic pockets of stone, carved wood, bursts of color in 500-year-old stained glass, black chandeliers, vaulting ceilings of blue and gold. All is faded, but built to withstand time. Arches upon arches culminate in the high altar, where at noon every day a nun armed with a long poker opens the dark triptych cover to reveal panel upon panel in gilded and ornately sculpted wood. (It is closed at six each evening.)
The Roman Catholic Church created in many ways the nation’s soul back in the Middle Ages, and much of the power of that initial creation still survives as a living force at St. Mary’s. About 90% of Poles are Catholic, and during the communist years the Church was the only national organization that didn’t have Soviet advisers attached to it. (Pope John Paul II was formerly Archbishop of Kraków.) And yet in the light of today’s independence, the Church’s power may be slightly on the wane, at least to a young generation; with freedom, it has lost one of its roles. A fashionable young woman running an art gallery remarked to me that the Church was clinging so tightly to its power these days that it was in danger of becoming yet another form of indoctrination. This view was echoed by several other young Poles I spoke to—perhaps part of the Polish tendency to argue with whatever seems to represent the established order at the time.
One evening after dinner I went to the Piwnica Pod Baranami in the corner building of a related name, (Palac pod Baranami, which means Palace Under the Rams—a center for tickets to many cultural events and a good stop in planning one’s evening out). Three decades old, the theater-cabaret, thought by many the finest in Poland, was underground, with still a slightly dissenting university-pranks air about it, held in a room like a medieval castle cellar packed to overflowing. There were songs, bits of inverted theater, jokes, poetry. Because I understood little of it I kept wandering out to the bar, where a few dozen people had come to drink and drink in the underground ambience of the place. Everything verbal was lost on me, since I don’t speak Polish, but I recommend it as a quick entry into a very particular and important aspect of the local culture—to see Cracovians being their inventive, sociable selves, and in the late 20th century. (The cabaret performances take place Thursday and Saturday nights around 10 p.m., but get there at least a half hour earlier for good seats.)
Erasmus called Poland “the country of the scholars,” and Kraków’s feel is still very much that of a university town. Many of those cafés flourish because there are so many young people to read and argue in them, and those nearer the university have a different mood than those on the square. “What I love about Kraków,” a Renaissance literature student told me, “is that so many cafés are still underground.” Her pun was deliberate.
I spent nearly an hour visiting the Jagiellonian University collection, in the Gothic-era Collegium Maius building, five minutes’ walk from the square. (You need to book a place on a guided tour in the morning, or better, a day before.) The great treasure here is a fairly small 16th-century clock in the shape of a world globe, the first to indicate America, “a newly discovered land,” small and right where it should be, next to Madagascar.
I hired a taxi for two unrelated expeditions one afternoon, through a countryside of fields and small brick-and-stone houses with slant roofs, rather like a poor version of Italy. It was only twenty-odd miles from Kraków to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps where about four million people from over twenty European nations were murdered, two and a half million of them Jews. For personal reasons I had intended not to go; I am grateful I went, but I suggest that people think through carefully whether they truly want the experience or not. I will not do it the indignity of a brief description other than to say that to visit those two vast machines of death is the psychological equivalent of walking into a blowtorch. Nobody can see them and emerge unchanged.
The other expedition, as a kind of spiritual antidote, was to the salt mines at Wieliczka, only nine miles south of Kraków. The property of the kings of Poland, they have been in operation since the end of the 13th century. An 18th-century wag called them “as remarkable as the Pyramids and more useful”; they are surely one of the man-made wonders of the world. The mines reach 1200 feet underground, but a visitor descends on foot only some sixty-odd floors and emerges into wide and airy corridor upon corridor of what seems a soft gray stone—in fact salt. Here and there run tracks horses once pulled carriages of salt. More astonishing are the worried steps cut into the cavern-walls where, until the end of the 19th century, the salt was extracted by hammer and pick and carried up on men’s backs. Now it’s extracted by chemical solutions and mechanically lifted to the surface.
But one doesn’t go to this trouble to visit a mine. What these contain, unforgettably, are chapels going back three hundred years cut out of the salt walls so the fervent miners could worship every day. Here are larger-than-life statues of saints, kings, and elves, all carved by ordinary miners out of the dark gray salt, and so unexpected they take on the strangeness of a science-fiction film. These culminate, at nearly 400 feet underground, in an enormous high-ceilinged chapel, cathedral-like in scale, hung with three chandeliers of translucent salt and lined with sculpted statues and murals: the Nativity, the Last Supper, the passage from Bethlehem. The entire chapel was carved by three miners over the course of forty-five years, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. No photographs can do it justice: it must be seen to be believed.
Led on a walking tour by a small and detailed guidebook, I spent another afternoon exploring the Kazimierz, formerly the Jewish quarter of Kraków, in search of echoes of one side of my family heritage. It lies just south of the Wawel Castle, an easy walk from the Old City. Before the war there were about seventy thousand Jews here; most were killed by the Nazis, and fewer than two hundred Jews remain in Kraków now, with only one of the several surviving synagogues still active—the Remuh, with one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Despite my guidebook’s enthusiasm, I sadly found little evocative of the community that flourished here once, and I considered it a wasted afternoon, though others might find more. For somebody intent on touching as much of that heritage as possible, the place to visit is the 15th-century Old Synagogue on Szeroka Street, now a careful museum of the history and culture of Kraków’s Jews. Inquire about its opening days and hours first, which vary according to season.
If any one building is the heart of the Polish nation, which at times over the centuries has ceased to exist as a cartographical entity, it is Wawel Hill, with its castle and cathedral, essentially unchanged for five centuries and beneath which many of Poland’s poets and monarchs are buried. Now they are a museum, and their importance can be gleaned from the fact that there are always even more Polish visitors than foreigners. The castle part of the museum is more palace than fortress, of a stately architecture outside and a royal splendor inside. The Polish kings ruled from here from the 11th to 16th centuries, and much remains, despite those innumerable invasions—the Swedes burned it, the Russians occupied it, the Prussians plundered it, and the Austrians tried to demolish it. The worst indignity was its use as seat of the Nazi General Government from 1939 to 1945—and yet this is probably what saved Kraków from the architectural destruction that Warsaw received. Here are room after room of rare tapestries, gilded and painted scenic ceilings, lavish Baroque furniture, and even a Renaissance trio filling one room with 16th- and 17th-century music.
The 14th-century Cathedral—“the sanctuary of the nation” as the Polish Pope has said—seems crammed with history, austere, dignified, dark, and noble. Here are enormous tapestries, steep and muscular stone columns; silver and marble sarcophagi; a sense of deep determination, but not the open exultation of St. Mary’s. All but four of Poland’s forty-five monarchs are entombed in the many side chapels, near illuminated texts and treasured royal artifacts. From the tower above is the finest view of Kraków; in the crypts below the tombs of the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
In any other country this might seem mostly irrelevant to a visiting foreigner. In Kraków, to wander alongside little Polish schoolchildren, to see the reverence with which they are instructed in the distant past and the recent, that experience seems to sum up the passion and determination that lies beneath the vibrant poetry and life of all those cafés, the strollers in that square, the poetry in those preserved houses which have waited too many generations to be owned and looked after by their own people.
Saturday, April 3, 1993
Happy Birthday, 007: James Bond at Forty
Written for Forbes-FYI in 1993.
Forty years have passed since Ian Fleming’s James Bond first put on evening dress and strode into the casino of our collective imagination. In 1953 a lucky British public first glimpsed 007 standing alone by a roulette wheel (where else?) amid the elegant baroque of the casino at Royale-Les-Eaux, observing the enemy:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge…”
From the opening pages of Casino Royale, 007 had it all: the sophistication we envied, the danger we dreamed of, the girls we desired, the life we wanted. The fingerprints of Fleming’s style—an apparent worldliness, a precise sense of physical sensation, the urgency of the man alone—were already there. By the time Fleming died in 1964, he’d created in fourteen books a mythological hero, one of the greats of the century, for Bond is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones. And though the Bond films will probably go on forever and a series of book sequels has already gone on too long, we should celebrate his anniversary by looking fondly back at the original: the British secret agent licensed not only to kill but virtually print money. How, after all this time and nearly a hundred million copies sold, do Ian Fleming’s novels measure up? Can an outdated book-Bond ever hope to withstand an up-to-date film-Bond?
There is an enormous difference, of course. The films, which started as faithful adaptations of the books, became excursions into literally outer space. (Over half the earth’s population has seen at least one Bond movie, for those who are keeping track.) Film-Bond turned into a secret agent version of Superman, wearing a tux instead of a cape and destroying his enemies with quips and gadgetry. Sean Connery’s finesse aside, book-Bond—the archetype—remains a more complex character, and his exploits human and attainable.
What stuns the most, going back to the Fleming canon, is the books’ hypnotic power—a sheer drive and compelling readability that overcome the dull patches, Bond’s total lack of humor, and many implausibilities. (M. always seems to send our man into the teeth of an enemy who know every detail of his movements.) This headlong tension may partly be the result of the novels always being written quickly; they often seem less planned than vividly dreamt.
Eric Ambler, arguably the finest thriller writer of all, told me a couple of years ago that he thought the Bond books “definitely deserve to be read as literature.” Anthony Burgess went further: he called Goldfinger one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939, describing Bond as a “patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind…against…megalomaniacs.”
Who, then, is James Bond? A civil servant, probably born 1924; entered the employ of the Ministry of Defence at age seventeen, went to work for the Secret Service (M.I. 6) after the war. He performs his duties, according to M., “with outstanding bravery and distinction” though “with a streak of foolhardy.” He likes his eggs boiled for precisely three and a third minutes, and definitely smokes too much, a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos custom-made for him; each cigarette bears three gold bands. (At three packs a day, they must crowd his suitcase on long assignments.) He stands a little over six feet, weighs about 167 pounds; he lives in a comfortable flat in a square off the King’s Road in Chelsea, London, on an income (mid-Fifties) of about $4,200 a year. He has few friends. Several women notice a resemblance to Hoagy Carmichael, though it’s hard to see this in “the dark, rather cruel good looks” or “the thin vertical scar down his right cheek” or the “coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes.”
He is, however, emphatically not a spy: his job never involves stealing state secrets, blueprints for weapons, plans of invasion, etc. (The closest he comes to traditional espionage is receiving a stolen Russian cipher machine.) He is a secret agent, a loaded gun sent out to enact the will of his government without being caught. His ancestors are neither the actual Sigmund Rosemblum (“Reilly, Ace of Spies”) or John Buchan’s fictional Richard Hannay (The 39 Steps), but Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, or Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.
Despite some tentative passages—Fleming grew considerably as a writer in the first few books—Casino Royale still stands up as one of the best 007 novels. Bond has been sent to the slightly faded French casino by M. to win a 50 million franc game of baccarat against Le Chiffre, paymaster of Smersh, the Soviet organization for counterespionage abroad (Fleming’s version of one sector of the KGB). The prose is uneven but always vividly detailed; scene after scene are imprinted on the memory: Le Chiffre’s “obscene” benzedrine inhaler and the carpet-beater which he used to torture Bond genitally. The precise gestures of the card-games—no one has ever bettered Fleming at conveying the mano-a-mano drama of “polite” competitions like golf, bridge, vingt-et-un. The two Bulgar assassins blown up by a camera bomb (based on a real event from the war.) And cool, dark-haired Vesper Lynd, first of the Bond heroines, “with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter roughly.”
The book, published by Jonathan Cape with a first printing of 4,750, was generally applauded by the British critics and sold well enough for a second printing. The Listener hailed it as “supersonic John Buchan,” the Sunday Times called it “an extremely engaging affair” and said Fleming could become the best new English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work more probable. The Spectator found it “lively, most ingenious in detail…except for a too ingeniously sadistic bout of brutality…” A year later, when the novel came out in the USA, it fared worse, and sales were poor. Anthony Boucher, who never cared much for Bond, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Fleming “pads the book out to novel length, leading to an ending which surprises no one but Bond himself.” He did, however, admire the gambling scenes.
Thereafter a new Bond book appeared each spring—at the tail-end of the British Empire and the beginning of the British welfare state. Bond would prove a welcome antidote to both conditions. An independent, powerful Everyman who often sweats at the idea of his plane crashing, he is tied down to neither one setting, nor one woman, though he remains selflessly loyal to his country and gallant toward the heroine of each book. (The film formula of three lovelies per adventure, with one discarded or dead, one definitely dead, and one prize in his arms at the end, does not occur in the novels. Likewise, the gadgetry: the only sophisticated toys in the books are a few minor modifications to Bond’s Aston Martin in Goldfinger, and Nash’s lethal copy of Tolstoy in From Russia, With Love.)
The world of the books, then, is not that of John Le Carré, who crested the sixties’ 007 wave with his complex heightened realism, nor of Ambler’s cold, neutral political savvy. We are far from Philby’s treason or Graham Greene’s drab truths, and much closer to a romantic era of the Scarlet Pimpernel and even Gilbert & Sullivan. Bond is, no doubt, our last hero burdened with the weighty myth of empire.
Fleming himself, well after success arrived in spades, defended his creation thus: “Bond is not a hero, nor is he depicted as being very likeable or admirable…He’s not a bad man, but he is ruthless and self-indulgent. He enjoys the fight—he also enjoys the prizes. In fiction, people used to have blood in their veins. Nowadays they have pond water. My books are just out of step. But then so are all the people who read them…intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds….”
As the poet Phillip Larkin points out, what strikes one first about the novels today is “their unambiguous archaic decency. So far from being orgies of sex and sadism, as some outraged academics protested at the time, the books are nostalgic excursions…England is always right, foreigners are always wrong…Girls are treated with kindness and consideration, lust coming a decorous third. Life’s virtues are courage and loyalty, and its good things a traditional aristocracy of powerful cars, vintage wines, exclusive clubs, the old Times, the old five-pound note, the old Player’s packet.”
Indeed, the only double agent I can find is Vesper Lynd, who obliges the secret service and Bond by committing suicide. (“The bitch is dead now.”) Villains are always foreign: Russians, Bulgars, Germans, Koreans, Mexicans, Corsicans, Chinese, Yugoslavs. And they are always memorable: Doctor No with his metal hands and a heart on the wrong side of his body, Auric Goldfinger with his flaming red hair and mania for gold, Blofeld with his clinical love of death in all its forms, Sir Hugo Drax with his courtly manners and his cheating at cards. Sometimes, of course, these foreign villains try to pass themselves off as British. They always fail.
When Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964) built a simple house called Goldeneye above a private cove near the tiny banana port of Oracabessa on Jamaica’s north coast, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career in Naval Intelligence (his duties resembled M.’s rather than 007’s), he settled down to the London world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months' leave each winter. He would spend every winter at Goldeneye from 1946 until his death. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was on his seventh sojourn that Fleming conjured his secret agent, the man of action who was really a vicarious dream-self.
Of Scot ancestry (like Bond) Fleming had been a top athlete on the playing fields of Eton (like Bond) but never graduated (ditto). Without his father around—killed in WWI—and outshone by his elder brother Peter (the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the thirties, Brazilian Adventure), Ian already had a reputation for women and cars by the time he dismissed himself from Sandhurst, England’s West Point, after only one term. Like many writers in the process of forming, there was a good deal of the actor in him. In the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office—but failed the exam. He saw Moscow as a young Reuters correspondent. By 1933 he was back in London at one of the better brokerage houses. There he stayed until the war.
Despite claims Fleming made after the Bond wave hit, his war career in Naval Intelligence, as assistant to Admiral Godfrey, was mainly administrative. (Fleming apparently came to believe—or at least convinced a few very close friends—that he’d actually had to kill an enemy agent on a secret mission, either by sandbagging him, or with a concealed revolver, or a mysterious black hat, or by drowning. This acting went too far to be mere play; he had authorial photos taken posing with a gun like Bond’s while vaguely claiming the books were based on his own experiences—“my autobiography” he half-joked.) A colleague recalled him in the war years as a “young fashionable man about town…fastidious about dress, which the old salts of the Admiralty viewed with scorn.” After the war he landed a plum job, as Foreign Manager for The Sunday Times.
That same fastidiousness flavors the novels; part of their early success was due to their cultivated veneer of sophisticated knowledge. This was Fleming the journalist at work, going to expert sources for his information, for as many friends pointed out, it was hard to think of a single subject on which he was truly expert.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways: he was far less protective towards women than Bond. His brother’s success and his own past as something of a black sheep still followed him. If he could not quite be a successful man of action, he could invent one. As John Pearson puts it in his perceptive biography of Fleming, “when [Bond] looks at himself in the mirror…we see just how closely Fleming identifies himself…James Bond is simply Ian Fleming daydreaming in the third person.” Pearson makes the point firmly: Bond is essentially “this odd man’s weird obsession with himself.”
When Fleming finally fell it was for another man’s wife, Lady Anne Rothermere. Soon Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s fan” in Fleet Street circles; her husband was a newspaper magnate. And in late January 1952, with ten weeks of Jamaican sunshine before marriage at the end of his bachelorhood, he sat down in front of a battered Royal portable and brought James Bond to life. Can it be mere coincidence that, just as Bond dreams of asking the book’s heroine, Vesper, to marry him, she frees him by committing suicide? For that matter, the novels’ villains (usually physically repugnant, as if seen through a child’s eyes) often treat Bond in a fatherly way—and Fleming, as a boy, called his authoritative mother “M.”
Casino Royale, utterly unplanned, took Fleming barely two months. At forty-three he had written fictionally not so much as a short story. The hero’s name was appropriated from “one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic,” he once wrote. “I wanted the simples, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.”
Despite strong British reviews, the first few novels sold only moderately well in England and struggled in the States. But following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the visit of soon-to-be Prime Minister Anthony Eden to Goldeneye for a rest brought a flurry of attention to Fleming and Bond in the U.K., and the snowball began rolling. A similar exposure occurred when President Kennedy named From Russia, With Love as one his ten favorite books in 1961.
In our violent times it’s difficult to see how the books could have shocked: they pall beside the vindictive sadism of, say, Mickey Spillane, and Bond takes his fair share of the suffering. A list of 007’s injuries includes nerve poisoning, having his genitals mangled, his hand carved up, his little finger broken, a shoulder gnawed by a barracuda, and his spine rubberized by a traction machine, plus assorted knife wounds, burns, and the odd bullet. Unlike today’s screen heros, when Bond gets hurt he goes to hospital.
In the course of the novels he is hurt so repeatedly it’s a wonder he can manage to please women at all, much less those as demanding as Pussy Galore, Solitaire Latrelle, Tiffany Case, Honeychile Rider, and Tatiana Romanova. The books’ heroines are always integral to the plot, not a mere adjunct; several times they save Bond’s life. Though beautiful, they usually have a qualifying flaw: a broken nose, a limp, a difficult past, which arouses Bond’s sympathy alongside his lust. (His behavior is invariably gallant and gentlemanly.) They are of a type: usually a “bird with one wing down,” often semi-naked on first encounter, outdoor girls or elegant dressers, independent-minded yet needful of Bond’s protection, and aware he is not a man they can hold. He is almost always either the first real man in their lives or, unfortunately for them, the last.
After the first seven books Fleming began to “run out of puff.” This was part ennui and part ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s excessive habits. But it was no coincidence that the books’ decline in energy followed the first Bond films. Fleming had dreamed of best-sellerdom; in real life, fame exhausted and rankled. In interviews and letters he referred to Bond as his “cardboard dummy” or “a blunt instrument” and his books as “piffle.”
Fleming had long had his eye on the big film money, and for years offers came and went; Casino Royale was initially filmed as an hour-long American TV program. In 1961 Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli formed Eon Productions and acquired options on all but two of the books for a guaranteed minimum payment of $100,000 per film plus 5% of the producer’s profits. It was, for them, a steal.
Shortly before Fleming’s death, film-Bond began to replace book-Bond, in the powerful image of Sean Connery, as 007 became Britain’s most successful sixties export alongside the Beatles and the miniskirt. (Fleming saw only the first two, Dr. No and From Russia, With Love.) It is difficult to exaggerate the phenomenon of these movies, the most popular film series ever, and not just as financial blockbusters. In every man born after 1930, there surely still exists a part of his psyche which dreams of being James Bond.
Fleming died of a second heart attack in August, 1964, just before the release of Goldfinger, when the Bond boom exploded and paperback sales began to multiply many times over. For years he’d scrupulously neglected doctors’ advice to cut down on alcohol and tobacco; his words to the ambulance attendants were: “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you chaps.” (Fleming had also been weakened and embittered by continuing litigation over Thunderball, whose plot resembled a joint concoction with a film producer from years earlier.) It was estimated at his death that he had earned close to three million dollars off the books. The sale earlier that year of a controlling interest in his private company, Glidrose Productions, for a tenth that figure meant that his heirs would miss much of the really big money over the next three decades.
Fleming didn’t live to see 007 toiletries, bubble-gum cards, lunchboxes, board games, action dolls, spy kits, decoder rings, and a cartoon series for children. What he achieved temporarily within the thriller genre was to kill off (Bond’s greatest victim) the knowing detective as popular hero. Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey were now replaced by 007, the amateur sleuth by the professional secret agent, as the new magic formula was copied endlessly.
The Fleming Empire at first tried to satisfy readers’ lust for more Bond. By far the most successful Bond sequel appeared in 1968, four years after Fleming’s demise. Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” was really written by Kingsley Amis, a fan whose James Bond Dossier (1965) remains the liveliest barnacle on the Fleming reef.
Despite a certain success, no other Bond appeared until 1981, when (with Glidrose Productions behind him) the British mystery novelist John Gardner took up the mantle with License Renewed. This effort has been followed, at last count, by eleven others, which threaten to equal the Flemings with library shelf-space; sure-fire bestsellers, they demonstrate a reading public’s hunger for Bond—or at least the familiar. One doesn’t have to read far in bloodless Gardner to miss the original. His Bond really is a cardboard dummy, and his books owe more to the late films, verging on self-parody, than to Fleming. Though Fleming’s confessed concern from the start was to make money, his books never read that way; Gardner’s do.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life comes to overshadow his work. But Bond has almost totally erased Fleming: it is thanks to the films, rather than the books, that the 007 saga provides a worldwide image of the man of action. (Perhaps after a suitable time has passed, the films will have aged like Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes series, and as with Holmes, we may live to see them nostalgically re-filmed for new generations.) Still, all the books remain in print in many languages, and 007 is now virtually in the public domain; in a Bulgarian bestseller of a decade ago, an east-bloc bludgeon bests Bond.
What, in the end, makes the 007 of the books more compelling than his screen double? Can it be simply that he is more like us, even while up against overwhelming odds—that like Sherlock Holmes, despite his many victories, he always carries with him the possibility of failure? Let the last word belong to the man himself:
“Bond had always been a gambler…he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared.”
007 A LA CARTE
Casino Royale (1953). Baccarat superb; ditto tragic heroine (Vesper Lynd); most violent tortures. The perfect martini, 007-style. Le Chiffre the first of Fleming’s outsize father-figure villains.
Live and Let Die (1954). Bad Harlem, good Jamaican voodoo atmosphere. Strong, sultry clairvoyante Solitaire; Felix Leiter (CIA) as shark bait. “Negro genius” Mr. Big. Pirate treasure. Uneven.
Moonraker (1955). Only all-England setting. Fine villain in Hugo Drax, outplayed by Bond at bridge in Blades, M.’s exclusive club; otherwise dull. Gala Brand defends her feminine honor to the end.
Diamonds Are Forever (1956). Hot rock smuggling, from Africa to Las Vegas. Settings and villains (mobsters) too diffuse, though gem lore shines. A lovely Tiffany Case loses her virginity to 007.
From Russia, With Love (1957). Radical, persuasive structure; severe Moscow and aromatic Istanbul; well thought-out plot earned admiration of Raymond Chandler. Perhaps finest Bond. Who can forget Tatiana Romanova on the Orient Express, Red Grant’s deadly book, Rosa Klebb’s poisoned knitting needles, the gypsy fight, a loyal Kerim?
Doctor No (1958) Evocative Caribbean settings, Jamaica and Crab Key. Extremist villain (half Chinese, great aquarium) and delectable shell-collector Honeychile Rider. Most inventive torture (obstacle course ending in giant squid); intense, measured pace nearly equals its illustrious predecessor. Oddly lyrical and touching.
Goldfinger (1959). A crock equal to Drax; attention to detail makes plot (knock off Fort Knox) go down. Great canasta and golf games. Two blonde Masterton sisters perished by Odd job, the strong silent type, but Pussy Galore survives. Settings a snooze, though.
For Your Eyes Only (1960). Five uneven stories. Relieves the novels’ standard pattern; aptly divides the Bond canon. Paris, Vermont, Bermuda, Venice, the Indian Ocean. For fans’ eyes only.
Thunderball (1961). 007 at a health spa? Fleming’s fatigue shows, but technique masterly and steady. Nassau beautifully rendered, Domino’s poisoned foot well worth sucking. SPECTRE the new bad guys. Underwater scenes more vivid and persuasive than ever.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). Short, told convincingly from female viewpoint (Vivienne Michel). Bond to the rescue against Spillane-esque hoods in the Adirondacks. Guns and knives. Only fair.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). SPECTRE’s Blofeld plots to infect British livestock; 007 infiltrates Alpine Hideout posing as genealogist. Saves Italian countess Tracy from herself, only to doom her to death as Mrs. James Bond. Now he’s really bitter.
You Only Live Twice (1964). Most fantastic elements: Bond in Japan braves a garden of death run by Blofeld, slays him, escapes in a balloon. Kissy Suzuki dives naked for pearls and has to resort to aphrodisiacs to restore 007. Henderson, Bond’s guide to the Orient, based on Fleming’s old friend, legendary Aussie journalist Richard Hughes, also used by John le Carré in The Honorable Schoolboy.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1965). Left unrevised at Fleming’s death. London and Jamaica; a Soviet-brainwashed 007 tries to murder M. Rehabilitated, he is sent after Scaramanga, fastest gun in the world. Even Felix Leiter can’t salvage it as a weak end to series.
Octopussy (1966). Posthumous; two novellas; paperback contains a third story. Jamaica, Berlin, London. A last attempt to mine the Fleming mother lode. Finished work, at least, rather Maughamesque.
Dates given above are for British editions. U.S. editions may be a year later or nearly identical.
Staunch fans will want to try Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun (1968), publishing pseudonymously as “Robert Markham”). Also Amis’ The James Bond Dossier. Best all-round appreciation is Raymond Benson’s The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984).
Among first-edition biffs, Ian Fleming remains the most collected 20th century author. British first editions of the 007 books runs from, say $25 for the last to $1200 for the early ones.
Forty years have passed since Ian Fleming’s James Bond first put on evening dress and strode into the casino of our collective imagination. In 1953 a lucky British public first glimpsed 007 standing alone by a roulette wheel (where else?) amid the elegant baroque of the casino at Royale-Les-Eaux, observing the enemy:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge…”
From the opening pages of Casino Royale, 007 had it all: the sophistication we envied, the danger we dreamed of, the girls we desired, the life we wanted. The fingerprints of Fleming’s style—an apparent worldliness, a precise sense of physical sensation, the urgency of the man alone—were already there. By the time Fleming died in 1964, he’d created in fourteen books a mythological hero, one of the greats of the century, for Bond is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones. And though the Bond films will probably go on forever and a series of book sequels has already gone on too long, we should celebrate his anniversary by looking fondly back at the original: the British secret agent licensed not only to kill but virtually print money. How, after all this time and nearly a hundred million copies sold, do Ian Fleming’s novels measure up? Can an outdated book-Bond ever hope to withstand an up-to-date film-Bond?
There is an enormous difference, of course. The films, which started as faithful adaptations of the books, became excursions into literally outer space. (Over half the earth’s population has seen at least one Bond movie, for those who are keeping track.) Film-Bond turned into a secret agent version of Superman, wearing a tux instead of a cape and destroying his enemies with quips and gadgetry. Sean Connery’s finesse aside, book-Bond—the archetype—remains a more complex character, and his exploits human and attainable.
What stuns the most, going back to the Fleming canon, is the books’ hypnotic power—a sheer drive and compelling readability that overcome the dull patches, Bond’s total lack of humor, and many implausibilities. (M. always seems to send our man into the teeth of an enemy who know every detail of his movements.) This headlong tension may partly be the result of the novels always being written quickly; they often seem less planned than vividly dreamt.
Eric Ambler, arguably the finest thriller writer of all, told me a couple of years ago that he thought the Bond books “definitely deserve to be read as literature.” Anthony Burgess went further: he called Goldfinger one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939, describing Bond as a “patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind…against…megalomaniacs.”
Who, then, is James Bond? A civil servant, probably born 1924; entered the employ of the Ministry of Defence at age seventeen, went to work for the Secret Service (M.I. 6) after the war. He performs his duties, according to M., “with outstanding bravery and distinction” though “with a streak of foolhardy.” He likes his eggs boiled for precisely three and a third minutes, and definitely smokes too much, a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos custom-made for him; each cigarette bears three gold bands. (At three packs a day, they must crowd his suitcase on long assignments.) He stands a little over six feet, weighs about 167 pounds; he lives in a comfortable flat in a square off the King’s Road in Chelsea, London, on an income (mid-Fifties) of about $4,200 a year. He has few friends. Several women notice a resemblance to Hoagy Carmichael, though it’s hard to see this in “the dark, rather cruel good looks” or “the thin vertical scar down his right cheek” or the “coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes.”
He is, however, emphatically not a spy: his job never involves stealing state secrets, blueprints for weapons, plans of invasion, etc. (The closest he comes to traditional espionage is receiving a stolen Russian cipher machine.) He is a secret agent, a loaded gun sent out to enact the will of his government without being caught. His ancestors are neither the actual Sigmund Rosemblum (“Reilly, Ace of Spies”) or John Buchan’s fictional Richard Hannay (The 39 Steps), but Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, or Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.
Despite some tentative passages—Fleming grew considerably as a writer in the first few books—Casino Royale still stands up as one of the best 007 novels. Bond has been sent to the slightly faded French casino by M. to win a 50 million franc game of baccarat against Le Chiffre, paymaster of Smersh, the Soviet organization for counterespionage abroad (Fleming’s version of one sector of the KGB). The prose is uneven but always vividly detailed; scene after scene are imprinted on the memory: Le Chiffre’s “obscene” benzedrine inhaler and the carpet-beater which he used to torture Bond genitally. The precise gestures of the card-games—no one has ever bettered Fleming at conveying the mano-a-mano drama of “polite” competitions like golf, bridge, vingt-et-un. The two Bulgar assassins blown up by a camera bomb (based on a real event from the war.) And cool, dark-haired Vesper Lynd, first of the Bond heroines, “with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter roughly.”
The book, published by Jonathan Cape with a first printing of 4,750, was generally applauded by the British critics and sold well enough for a second printing. The Listener hailed it as “supersonic John Buchan,” the Sunday Times called it “an extremely engaging affair” and said Fleming could become the best new English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work more probable. The Spectator found it “lively, most ingenious in detail…except for a too ingeniously sadistic bout of brutality…” A year later, when the novel came out in the USA, it fared worse, and sales were poor. Anthony Boucher, who never cared much for Bond, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Fleming “pads the book out to novel length, leading to an ending which surprises no one but Bond himself.” He did, however, admire the gambling scenes.
Thereafter a new Bond book appeared each spring—at the tail-end of the British Empire and the beginning of the British welfare state. Bond would prove a welcome antidote to both conditions. An independent, powerful Everyman who often sweats at the idea of his plane crashing, he is tied down to neither one setting, nor one woman, though he remains selflessly loyal to his country and gallant toward the heroine of each book. (The film formula of three lovelies per adventure, with one discarded or dead, one definitely dead, and one prize in his arms at the end, does not occur in the novels. Likewise, the gadgetry: the only sophisticated toys in the books are a few minor modifications to Bond’s Aston Martin in Goldfinger, and Nash’s lethal copy of Tolstoy in From Russia, With Love.)
The world of the books, then, is not that of John Le Carré, who crested the sixties’ 007 wave with his complex heightened realism, nor of Ambler’s cold, neutral political savvy. We are far from Philby’s treason or Graham Greene’s drab truths, and much closer to a romantic era of the Scarlet Pimpernel and even Gilbert & Sullivan. Bond is, no doubt, our last hero burdened with the weighty myth of empire.
Fleming himself, well after success arrived in spades, defended his creation thus: “Bond is not a hero, nor is he depicted as being very likeable or admirable…He’s not a bad man, but he is ruthless and self-indulgent. He enjoys the fight—he also enjoys the prizes. In fiction, people used to have blood in their veins. Nowadays they have pond water. My books are just out of step. But then so are all the people who read them…intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds….”
As the poet Phillip Larkin points out, what strikes one first about the novels today is “their unambiguous archaic decency. So far from being orgies of sex and sadism, as some outraged academics protested at the time, the books are nostalgic excursions…England is always right, foreigners are always wrong…Girls are treated with kindness and consideration, lust coming a decorous third. Life’s virtues are courage and loyalty, and its good things a traditional aristocracy of powerful cars, vintage wines, exclusive clubs, the old Times, the old five-pound note, the old Player’s packet.”
Indeed, the only double agent I can find is Vesper Lynd, who obliges the secret service and Bond by committing suicide. (“The bitch is dead now.”) Villains are always foreign: Russians, Bulgars, Germans, Koreans, Mexicans, Corsicans, Chinese, Yugoslavs. And they are always memorable: Doctor No with his metal hands and a heart on the wrong side of his body, Auric Goldfinger with his flaming red hair and mania for gold, Blofeld with his clinical love of death in all its forms, Sir Hugo Drax with his courtly manners and his cheating at cards. Sometimes, of course, these foreign villains try to pass themselves off as British. They always fail.
When Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964) built a simple house called Goldeneye above a private cove near the tiny banana port of Oracabessa on Jamaica’s north coast, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career in Naval Intelligence (his duties resembled M.’s rather than 007’s), he settled down to the London world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months' leave each winter. He would spend every winter at Goldeneye from 1946 until his death. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was on his seventh sojourn that Fleming conjured his secret agent, the man of action who was really a vicarious dream-self.
Of Scot ancestry (like Bond) Fleming had been a top athlete on the playing fields of Eton (like Bond) but never graduated (ditto). Without his father around—killed in WWI—and outshone by his elder brother Peter (the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the thirties, Brazilian Adventure), Ian already had a reputation for women and cars by the time he dismissed himself from Sandhurst, England’s West Point, after only one term. Like many writers in the process of forming, there was a good deal of the actor in him. In the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office—but failed the exam. He saw Moscow as a young Reuters correspondent. By 1933 he was back in London at one of the better brokerage houses. There he stayed until the war.
Despite claims Fleming made after the Bond wave hit, his war career in Naval Intelligence, as assistant to Admiral Godfrey, was mainly administrative. (Fleming apparently came to believe—or at least convinced a few very close friends—that he’d actually had to kill an enemy agent on a secret mission, either by sandbagging him, or with a concealed revolver, or a mysterious black hat, or by drowning. This acting went too far to be mere play; he had authorial photos taken posing with a gun like Bond’s while vaguely claiming the books were based on his own experiences—“my autobiography” he half-joked.) A colleague recalled him in the war years as a “young fashionable man about town…fastidious about dress, which the old salts of the Admiralty viewed with scorn.” After the war he landed a plum job, as Foreign Manager for The Sunday Times.
That same fastidiousness flavors the novels; part of their early success was due to their cultivated veneer of sophisticated knowledge. This was Fleming the journalist at work, going to expert sources for his information, for as many friends pointed out, it was hard to think of a single subject on which he was truly expert.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways: he was far less protective towards women than Bond. His brother’s success and his own past as something of a black sheep still followed him. If he could not quite be a successful man of action, he could invent one. As John Pearson puts it in his perceptive biography of Fleming, “when [Bond] looks at himself in the mirror…we see just how closely Fleming identifies himself…James Bond is simply Ian Fleming daydreaming in the third person.” Pearson makes the point firmly: Bond is essentially “this odd man’s weird obsession with himself.”
When Fleming finally fell it was for another man’s wife, Lady Anne Rothermere. Soon Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s fan” in Fleet Street circles; her husband was a newspaper magnate. And in late January 1952, with ten weeks of Jamaican sunshine before marriage at the end of his bachelorhood, he sat down in front of a battered Royal portable and brought James Bond to life. Can it be mere coincidence that, just as Bond dreams of asking the book’s heroine, Vesper, to marry him, she frees him by committing suicide? For that matter, the novels’ villains (usually physically repugnant, as if seen through a child’s eyes) often treat Bond in a fatherly way—and Fleming, as a boy, called his authoritative mother “M.”
Casino Royale, utterly unplanned, took Fleming barely two months. At forty-three he had written fictionally not so much as a short story. The hero’s name was appropriated from “one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic,” he once wrote. “I wanted the simples, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.”
Despite strong British reviews, the first few novels sold only moderately well in England and struggled in the States. But following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the visit of soon-to-be Prime Minister Anthony Eden to Goldeneye for a rest brought a flurry of attention to Fleming and Bond in the U.K., and the snowball began rolling. A similar exposure occurred when President Kennedy named From Russia, With Love as one his ten favorite books in 1961.
In our violent times it’s difficult to see how the books could have shocked: they pall beside the vindictive sadism of, say, Mickey Spillane, and Bond takes his fair share of the suffering. A list of 007’s injuries includes nerve poisoning, having his genitals mangled, his hand carved up, his little finger broken, a shoulder gnawed by a barracuda, and his spine rubberized by a traction machine, plus assorted knife wounds, burns, and the odd bullet. Unlike today’s screen heros, when Bond gets hurt he goes to hospital.
In the course of the novels he is hurt so repeatedly it’s a wonder he can manage to please women at all, much less those as demanding as Pussy Galore, Solitaire Latrelle, Tiffany Case, Honeychile Rider, and Tatiana Romanova. The books’ heroines are always integral to the plot, not a mere adjunct; several times they save Bond’s life. Though beautiful, they usually have a qualifying flaw: a broken nose, a limp, a difficult past, which arouses Bond’s sympathy alongside his lust. (His behavior is invariably gallant and gentlemanly.) They are of a type: usually a “bird with one wing down,” often semi-naked on first encounter, outdoor girls or elegant dressers, independent-minded yet needful of Bond’s protection, and aware he is not a man they can hold. He is almost always either the first real man in their lives or, unfortunately for them, the last.
After the first seven books Fleming began to “run out of puff.” This was part ennui and part ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s excessive habits. But it was no coincidence that the books’ decline in energy followed the first Bond films. Fleming had dreamed of best-sellerdom; in real life, fame exhausted and rankled. In interviews and letters he referred to Bond as his “cardboard dummy” or “a blunt instrument” and his books as “piffle.”
Fleming had long had his eye on the big film money, and for years offers came and went; Casino Royale was initially filmed as an hour-long American TV program. In 1961 Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli formed Eon Productions and acquired options on all but two of the books for a guaranteed minimum payment of $100,000 per film plus 5% of the producer’s profits. It was, for them, a steal.
Shortly before Fleming’s death, film-Bond began to replace book-Bond, in the powerful image of Sean Connery, as 007 became Britain’s most successful sixties export alongside the Beatles and the miniskirt. (Fleming saw only the first two, Dr. No and From Russia, With Love.) It is difficult to exaggerate the phenomenon of these movies, the most popular film series ever, and not just as financial blockbusters. In every man born after 1930, there surely still exists a part of his psyche which dreams of being James Bond.
Fleming died of a second heart attack in August, 1964, just before the release of Goldfinger, when the Bond boom exploded and paperback sales began to multiply many times over. For years he’d scrupulously neglected doctors’ advice to cut down on alcohol and tobacco; his words to the ambulance attendants were: “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you chaps.” (Fleming had also been weakened and embittered by continuing litigation over Thunderball, whose plot resembled a joint concoction with a film producer from years earlier.) It was estimated at his death that he had earned close to three million dollars off the books. The sale earlier that year of a controlling interest in his private company, Glidrose Productions, for a tenth that figure meant that his heirs would miss much of the really big money over the next three decades.
Fleming didn’t live to see 007 toiletries, bubble-gum cards, lunchboxes, board games, action dolls, spy kits, decoder rings, and a cartoon series for children. What he achieved temporarily within the thriller genre was to kill off (Bond’s greatest victim) the knowing detective as popular hero. Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey were now replaced by 007, the amateur sleuth by the professional secret agent, as the new magic formula was copied endlessly.
The Fleming Empire at first tried to satisfy readers’ lust for more Bond. By far the most successful Bond sequel appeared in 1968, four years after Fleming’s demise. Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” was really written by Kingsley Amis, a fan whose James Bond Dossier (1965) remains the liveliest barnacle on the Fleming reef.
Despite a certain success, no other Bond appeared until 1981, when (with Glidrose Productions behind him) the British mystery novelist John Gardner took up the mantle with License Renewed. This effort has been followed, at last count, by eleven others, which threaten to equal the Flemings with library shelf-space; sure-fire bestsellers, they demonstrate a reading public’s hunger for Bond—or at least the familiar. One doesn’t have to read far in bloodless Gardner to miss the original. His Bond really is a cardboard dummy, and his books owe more to the late films, verging on self-parody, than to Fleming. Though Fleming’s confessed concern from the start was to make money, his books never read that way; Gardner’s do.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life comes to overshadow his work. But Bond has almost totally erased Fleming: it is thanks to the films, rather than the books, that the 007 saga provides a worldwide image of the man of action. (Perhaps after a suitable time has passed, the films will have aged like Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes series, and as with Holmes, we may live to see them nostalgically re-filmed for new generations.) Still, all the books remain in print in many languages, and 007 is now virtually in the public domain; in a Bulgarian bestseller of a decade ago, an east-bloc bludgeon bests Bond.
What, in the end, makes the 007 of the books more compelling than his screen double? Can it be simply that he is more like us, even while up against overwhelming odds—that like Sherlock Holmes, despite his many victories, he always carries with him the possibility of failure? Let the last word belong to the man himself:
“Bond had always been a gambler…he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared.”
007 A LA CARTE
Casino Royale (1953). Baccarat superb; ditto tragic heroine (Vesper Lynd); most violent tortures. The perfect martini, 007-style. Le Chiffre the first of Fleming’s outsize father-figure villains.
Live and Let Die (1954). Bad Harlem, good Jamaican voodoo atmosphere. Strong, sultry clairvoyante Solitaire; Felix Leiter (CIA) as shark bait. “Negro genius” Mr. Big. Pirate treasure. Uneven.
Moonraker (1955). Only all-England setting. Fine villain in Hugo Drax, outplayed by Bond at bridge in Blades, M.’s exclusive club; otherwise dull. Gala Brand defends her feminine honor to the end.
Diamonds Are Forever (1956). Hot rock smuggling, from Africa to Las Vegas. Settings and villains (mobsters) too diffuse, though gem lore shines. A lovely Tiffany Case loses her virginity to 007.
From Russia, With Love (1957). Radical, persuasive structure; severe Moscow and aromatic Istanbul; well thought-out plot earned admiration of Raymond Chandler. Perhaps finest Bond. Who can forget Tatiana Romanova on the Orient Express, Red Grant’s deadly book, Rosa Klebb’s poisoned knitting needles, the gypsy fight, a loyal Kerim?
Doctor No (1958) Evocative Caribbean settings, Jamaica and Crab Key. Extremist villain (half Chinese, great aquarium) and delectable shell-collector Honeychile Rider. Most inventive torture (obstacle course ending in giant squid); intense, measured pace nearly equals its illustrious predecessor. Oddly lyrical and touching.
Goldfinger (1959). A crock equal to Drax; attention to detail makes plot (knock off Fort Knox) go down. Great canasta and golf games. Two blonde Masterton sisters perished by Odd job, the strong silent type, but Pussy Galore survives. Settings a snooze, though.
For Your Eyes Only (1960). Five uneven stories. Relieves the novels’ standard pattern; aptly divides the Bond canon. Paris, Vermont, Bermuda, Venice, the Indian Ocean. For fans’ eyes only.
Thunderball (1961). 007 at a health spa? Fleming’s fatigue shows, but technique masterly and steady. Nassau beautifully rendered, Domino’s poisoned foot well worth sucking. SPECTRE the new bad guys. Underwater scenes more vivid and persuasive than ever.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). Short, told convincingly from female viewpoint (Vivienne Michel). Bond to the rescue against Spillane-esque hoods in the Adirondacks. Guns and knives. Only fair.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). SPECTRE’s Blofeld plots to infect British livestock; 007 infiltrates Alpine Hideout posing as genealogist. Saves Italian countess Tracy from herself, only to doom her to death as Mrs. James Bond. Now he’s really bitter.
You Only Live Twice (1964). Most fantastic elements: Bond in Japan braves a garden of death run by Blofeld, slays him, escapes in a balloon. Kissy Suzuki dives naked for pearls and has to resort to aphrodisiacs to restore 007. Henderson, Bond’s guide to the Orient, based on Fleming’s old friend, legendary Aussie journalist Richard Hughes, also used by John le Carré in The Honorable Schoolboy.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1965). Left unrevised at Fleming’s death. London and Jamaica; a Soviet-brainwashed 007 tries to murder M. Rehabilitated, he is sent after Scaramanga, fastest gun in the world. Even Felix Leiter can’t salvage it as a weak end to series.
Octopussy (1966). Posthumous; two novellas; paperback contains a third story. Jamaica, Berlin, London. A last attempt to mine the Fleming mother lode. Finished work, at least, rather Maughamesque.
Dates given above are for British editions. U.S. editions may be a year later or nearly identical.
Staunch fans will want to try Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun (1968), publishing pseudonymously as “Robert Markham”). Also Amis’ The James Bond Dossier. Best all-round appreciation is Raymond Benson’s The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984).
Among first-edition biffs, Ian Fleming remains the most collected 20th century author. British first editions of the 007 books runs from, say $25 for the last to $1200 for the early ones.
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