Happenstance
While I can’t give the exact date when I was first prompted to look under the hood and see how the clever Mr. Fleming went about souping up his later Bond novels, I do remember precisely where I was. I was a freshman strolling along Jayhawk Boulevard on the KU campus in Lawrence, Kansas, with a stack of books under my arm, hurrying to a class in Medieval literature.
Our group read, discussed, and wrote papers about American poet John Ciardi’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, and about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the anonymous poem that launched a thousand essays and a handful of movies (most of them awful). We also had to read a generic Arthurian story that was simply listed in our anthology as “A Medieval Romance.”
It was the romance that was stuck in my head that day in the spring of 1970. I couldn’t stop thinking that the shape of the tale lined up uncannily with the plot of a film I had seen over Christmas break, an unusually faithful screen adaptation of an Ian Fleming novel which I had read several years earlier, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. A few weeks later as our class delved into the world of Gawain, there was another set of similarities to consider. Fleming’s novel seemed to incorporate an abundance of details from the late 14th-century poem.
- Key events in both works take place over Yuletide. Gawain is tested during holiday feasts at Arthur’s court and Bertilak’s castle, while Bond spends the lead-up to Christmas uncovering Blofeld’s plot at the villain's Alpine clinic, then plans the assault on Piz Gloria over Christmas dinner at M’s house.
- Challenged to a bizarre duel, Gawain beheads the Green Knight only to see him pick up his severed head and announce that he will deliver his counterstroke one year hence at the Green Chapel in a land beyond the northern mountains.
- Although Bond seemed to deal Blofeld’s organization a fatal blow back in Thunderball, suspecting a renewed threat from the villain in OHMSS, he journeys to a mysterious mountain stronghold to finish their deadly game.
- In both the antique poem and the modern thriller, the hero faces a foe whose appearance has been transformed. Gawain doesn’t suspect that Bertilak is the Green Knight; Bond is left to ponder whether the Comte de Bleuchamp can really be Blofeld.
- There is a sinister older woman in Bertilak's castle and in Blofeld’s lair who serves as wardress for ladies under her supervision.
- While enjoying his adversary’s hospitality each hero faces sexual temptation. Gawain is more resolute than Bond on this score, but even Arthur’s knight must admit that he has yielded to a woman’s wiles.
- In both works, the return-stroke occurs on New Year’s Day. Although blood is drawn, the hero survives, a saddened and humbled figure.
Following Fleming’s own familiar dictum on the subject, there are already too many similarities listed to be passed off as happenstance or coincidence, with still more to come (see “The Spy Who Loved Me”). But Sir Gawain wasn’t the author's only source.
The Peeples Connection:
As I walked to class in 1970 it gave me a tingle to imagine that I might be holding some of Fleming’s raw materials under my arm. However, even when I first read the novel shortly after its publication in 1963, I suspected that a key plot-point had been borrowed from television.
Westerns made up a sizable percentage of televised entertainment in the early 1960’s, and one of my family’s favorites, while it lasted, was The Tall Man with Barry Sullivan and Clu Gulager. The series followed a fictional friendship between Pat Garrett and the young outlaw whose eventual death would forever link the two figures.
A story called “Bitter Ashes,” written and produced by series creator Samuel A. Peeples (who would later work with Gene Roddenberry on his Star Trek series), first aired in December 1960. “Bitter Ashes” is an extended dirge for a doomed romance between the famed lawman and a beautiful, half-Mexican settler (portrayed by Estonian-born Narda Onyx) whom he rescues in the first scene of the episode.
Redoubtable character actor R. G. Armstrong is the villainous Neal Bailey, a rancher who ruthlessly tramples over anyone in his path to becoming a cattle baron. Bailey accidentally kills the father of Garrett’s love interest, while trying to force the old man from his land. In a brief gunfight Garrett wings the would-be baron before escorting the endangered young lady to safety. While recovering from his shoulder wound, Bailey fumes and plots his revenge.
Determined to hang up his revolvers and settle down, the lawman proposes marriage and the couple set a date. After the newlyweds pass through a cheering crowd, Garrett helps his bride climb into their carriage. Before they can drive away to begin their life together, Billy the Kid spies Bailey taking aim and shouts a warning. A shot rings out. The new Mrs. Garrett topples into her husband’s arms and dies.
Being a sensitive nine-year-old I avoiding watching the episode on its premiere in 1960 and a return engagement the following summer, warned off by a flurry of TV ads that gave away the heartbreaking ending. Nonetheless, I remained suspicious that Fleming might have borrowed the final scene of his novel from Peeples’s teleplay for a low-rated TV Western even before being reminded, some five decades later, that the name of the lawman's slain sweetheart was “Teresa.”
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