Wild idling
For reasons unclear even to myself, I am reading a bit of Ian Fleming's Live and Let Die. I just ran across the Ouroboros sighting that Bill alerted me to back in 2008.
These confirmedthat the yacht had put in at irregular intervals over the previous six months and that she always tied up in the Port of St. Petersburg at the wharf of the 'Ouroboros Worm and Bait Shippers, Inc.,' an apparently innocent concern whose main business was to sell live bait to fishing clubs throughout Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and further afield.
On the occasion of that post, Levi commented that he hoped Fleming was a better spy than he was a prose writer...
Q: How can I recommend L&LD to Levi?
A: Tell him there is a full three pages of straight quotation from one of his favorite travel writers, Patrick Leigh Fermor.
It's true! It includes this footnote from the author: "This [The Traveller's Tree], one of the great travel books, is published by Harper & Brothers, at $5.00"
Also, Bond's sensory intake at the beginning, as he's being driven into Manhattan from Idlewild (quoted yesterday), is remarkable.
Labels: Ian Fleming, Ouroboros, Patrick Leigh Fermor
posted by Ed Park @ 9:43 AM
1 Comments:
I know, from Fermor's letters to Deborah Mitford, that he and Ian were acquaintances (there's a reasonably solid joke in there about the bondage games that Ian and his wife were rumored to enjoy). Can't remember whether he and Peter Fleming were friends; it seems likely they would have been, and not just because of the inevitability associated with that class at that time, but because their travel interests would surely have overlapped at least a bit.
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