‘So poetic a pleasure’: Simon Raven and the seductive poetry of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
Credited with writing ‘additional dialogue’ for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and responsible for some of the film’s most memorable and poetic lines, outrageously outspoken queer writer Simon Raven had much in common with Bond, including his snobbery, his far from conventional sexuality and a scandal from his school days.
You know the scene. It kicks off the final act. It’s dawn. We’re at Piz Gloria, Blofeld’s mountain hideaway. Over Blofeld’s radio, Tracy recognises her father’s voice. She knows he’s coming to get her - probably in the company of her fiancé, James Bond. Rather than settling into demure damselhood, Tracy hatches a plan to distract Blofeld. And that plan involves poetry.
Tracy: Take me to the Alpine Room.
Blofeld Oh? Are you unhappy here?
Tracy: Oh, I want to see the dawn.
Blofeld: Ah, so poetic a pleasure.
‘What were all the world’s charms
To mighty Paris when he found
That first dawn in the arms of his Helen?’
Tracy: And when do you expect the signal accepting your terms?
Blofeld: Any time before midnight tonight.
Tracy:
‘Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn
For thee the sunlight creeps across the lawn.
For thee the ships are drawn down to the waves.
For thee the markets throng with myriad slaves.
For thee the hammer on the anvil rings.
For thee the poet of beguilement sings.’
When I wrote my queer re-view of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I tried to distil a little of what makes the scene so memorable:
The badinage between Tracy and Blofeld is one of the highlights of the film, principally because we know that Tracy has everything under control despite appearances to the contrary. It’s the classic ‘villain seduces Bond’ scene but in reverse - with the future Mrs Bond in the position of power.
But there’s more to say about this scene, where the stars really align in this scene. It’s a glorious confluence of the creative arts; the just-passed-golden-hour photography is sublime; the performances are nuanced and given space to breathe; the music cue ‘Over out Out’ is one of Barry’s finest. Both of these elements have attracted copious critical attention but I think it’s time we also gave the words the attention they deserve.
According to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service director Peter Hunt, he brought on board novelist and screenwriter Simon Raven "to make the dialogue better and a little sharper and more intellectual” and he specifically pinpointed the scene between Tracy and Blofeld. Compared with Hunt, whose contribution to the Bond series cannot be overestimated, Raven amounts to a footnote in the history of Bond - but a significant one.
‘Life is short and the world is wide’ - Simon Raven
Raven packed a lot into his 73 years.
In his early forties at the time of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service’s production, Raven was an established writer of more than a dozen novels and screenplays who would go on to write many more. ‘Prolific’ is an adjective bandied about too freely but for Raven it’s appropriate. The man could write - when he wasn’t distracted. And Raven had more than his fair share of distractions.
A decade before he was hired by Peter Hunt, Raven had left the army in disgrace and was struggling financially. He received sufficient monetary assistance from young publisher Anthony Blond (with whom it is probable he had a personal as well as professional relationship), to work on and publish his first novel. A condition of their arrangement was that he left London. Blond insisted on it. If he stayed in London, he would never get down to actually writing. The distractions were too plentiful.
In his first novel, The Feathers of Death, Raven explores a sexual relationship between an upper class British army officer and a young, working class soldier. Heady stuff for 1959! At this time, any man who was caught engaging in homosexual acts like those in the novel (depicted with arresting honesty!) would have been breaking UK law. Well, perhaps not any man. The novel’s real concern is the divide between the values of the upper class and everyone else. If you were posh enough you could get away with it - almost.
One reviewer described it as a “bombshell of a book”, a quote which Anthony Blond could not resist using in the marketing. Even when I read the novel recently, I was surprised by how matter-of-factly the protagonist, Lieutenant Alastair Lynch, openly lusts after other men without apparent censure. Barely six pages in, Lynch and his fellow officers are spectating at a very homoerotic boxing match and Lynch only has eyes for the fighters’ underwear: “How erotic those white shorts are…” None of the officers around him make any comment, although the narrator - a blank slate character who doesn’t even get a name until several chapters in - does go on to remark that one of the boxers is “bursting out of a kind of loose and totally inadequate jock-strap”.
The impression created by Raven creates is that of a highly sexualised homosocial environment and homosexual acts are nothing to be concerned about, at least for the upper class officers. The novel’s drama derives from a clash between upper class tolerance and the discriminatory values of the middle and working classes. When Alastair starts having sex with a low-ranking soldier - noisily, in his tent no less - it rubs others’ noses in it and the seeds are sown for a tragic outcome.
*Spoiler alert* Midway through, Alastair shoots his young lover in the back and it’s not clear whether he did it out of necessity or jealousy. Even Alastair isn’t sure. Just as he is acquitted of murder, he is stabbed to death, a working class friend of his dead lover wielding the bayonet which kills Alastair. His killer, the narrator surmises, is secretly homosexual and not able to act of his impulses because of the norms of his class. The twist is that this working class soldier was jealous of Alastair all along: not just for having a sexual relationship with his friend (who he was secretly pining for), but for being able to be openly engaged in homosexual acts.
As I read the novel, I couldn’t help but reflect on how my own middle class outlook was affecting my perception of Alastair. In my mind, his same sex attraction was his main redeeming quality. He’s a greatly flawed character and not very sympathetic. He is unrepentantly self-serving. And as I alternated reading chapters with researching Raven’s own life, I started to wonder if this could have been something of a self-portrait of Raven himself.
Throughout his career, Raven drew on his own real-life exploits. And although it was gambling debts that ended his military career, he knew first-hand what it was like to be at the centre of a sex scandal. He was expelled from Eton for “serial homosexuality”. Note, not homosexuality per se, but ‘serial’ homosexuality. A few times could have hushed up, even tacitly approved of. But Raven was not one to be shy about his sex life. In his obituary, The Telegraph quoted him as saying: ‘I like all four types… amateur and professional men and amateur and professional women’ before adding “His one caveat was never to become involved.”
The more I read about Raven, the more I came to realise he had a lot in common with James Bond, and to an extent Ian Fleming as well. Like Raven, Bond does not like to get involved. Like Raven, Bond was forced to leave Eton, albeit (according to his obituary in You Only Live Twice) for “some alleged trouble with one of the boys' maids” rather than making advances on the other boys. Like Raven, Bond adores gambling - although he’s far more successful than Raven or Fleming.
Both Raven and Fleming were supported in their literary careers by queer figures. Perhaps it was the queer streak in both writers’ works which appealed to Anthony Blond and William Plomer, Fleming’s editor, respectively.
Most significant of all that Raven, Fleming and Bond have in common is that they epitomise the British establishment while also subverting it. They were outsiders who also had what it took to be on the inside - when they chose to.
Like Alastair in The Feathers of Death, Raven felt invulnerable due to his class. From his position of privilege, he complained about other queer writers from other walks of life bemoaning their outsider status. Writing in the London Review of Books in 1980, he used the pretence of reviewing a book written by another queer writer to make plain his views:
In novels by most heterosexuals, and by many homosexuals as well, there is a strong tendency to portray ‘queer’ men as evil seducers or else as capering clowns. ‘The homosexual hero’, on the other hand, since he is presented by authors sympathetic to homosexuality, makes serious proclamation (and boy, oh boy, does he proclaim) of his right to lead his own life in his own way, regardless of parodists and in defiance of persecutors, to reinterpret social and moral conventions in his own terms and in the interest of his own special condition, and to seek out or create his own brave new world beyond the boundaries of the dreary dump in which (it is implied) mere heterosexuals are content to fret and rot from crib to coffin.
Raven was, then, not exactly sympathetic to those who spoke out about - and campaigned for - equal rights. The solution he advocated was to be complicit:
But if you keep your head and voice down (which is a good rule in any context) you need fear neither hostility nor ridicule. Ah, you say, but people disapprove. People disapprove of lots of jolly things – of football pools, rich cookery, rude films, Princess Margaret Rose, foreign travel and the public schools – yet all these institutions continue unabashed. So can you. I count among my homosexual acquaintances a whole squadron of dons and schoolmasters, at least one general, several well-regarded MPs and substantial civil servants, and a banker – to say nothing of writers, painters, actors and fashionable male whores. The only thing any of these ever complains about is the sanctimonious imbecility of the Gay Liberation movement, as it shrilly and effortlessly goes about destroying its own cause.
The letters he received in response were excoriating, with one correspondent labelleling what he had written as nothing less than ‘queer-bashing’. From what I’ve read of Raven, he would have relished being at the centre of the controversy he stirred up with his words.
In Peter Hunt’s service
Raven brings his typically acerbic touch to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. While it’s hard to pinpoint Raven’s contributions precisely without further firsthand testimony, MI6-HQ writer Ben Williams detects Raven’s contributions throughout the Piz Gloria scenes:
I suspect that the lion’s share of the Piz Gloria dialogue was Raven’s. Especially the dialogue between Hilly and the Angels. That whole section of the film feels like [Noel] Coward doing Fleming. The humour of OHMSS is also very Raven. For instance, one can’t imagine the “earlobes” line coming from anywhere else. Plus Bond’s entire demeanour is (at least in Piz Gloria) rakish and caddish. There is a tongue-in-cheek cynicism that I can’t picture coming from Maibaum’s pen.
Specifically, Williams finds similarities between the words Bond (as gay-coded Hilary Bray) uses to seduce the Angels of Death and the work of another queer writer Raven would have been acquainted with: Noel Coward. In his 1931 play Private Lives Coward has one lover tell another: “You’re looking very lovely you know, in this damned moonlight. Your skin is clear and cool and your eyes are shining, and you’re growing lovelier”. This is uncannily close to the seduction speech trotted off by Bond/Hilly: “You’re a picture yourself, and twice as lovely in the firelight.”
Raven and Coward were complete opposites in some regards; the former was unrepentently ‘out’ (although unwilling to ascribe a label, such as ‘bisexual’ or ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’, to himself) whereas Coward remained in the closet, aside from with close friends and acquaintances, for his whole life.
Raven was hardly an adherent to the notion of heterosexual monogamy and the scenes with ‘Hilly’ among the Angels amount to a parody of such courtship conventions. He uses a Coward-style to mock the well-mannered approach he himself eschewed in real-life. The same subversive undercurrent informs the scene we definitively know Raven to have contributed: the ‘Alpine Room’ exchange between Tracy and Blofeld.
We of course need to be cautious in ascribing too much biography to a short, albeit pivotal, scene. As Roland Barthes famously observed, "To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text". But the ‘Alpine Room’ scene is so quintessentially Raven that it really stands out, and it’s worth exploring in detail.
‘I want to see the dawn’
Raven inserts excerpts from two different poems into the screenplay. The first is spoken by Blofeld, in response to Tracy’s request to move to another part of Piz Gloria, away from the radio room. She purports to want to see the dawn, a “poetic” pleasure Which Blofeld endorses by quoting William Butler Yeats. Well, misquoting at least.
The poem is Yeats’s Lullaby. The original 4 lines (of a total of 18) run as follows:
What were all the world's alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen's arms?
Raven has Blofeld speak the following:
What were all the world’s charms
To mighty Paris when he found
That first dawn in the arms of his Helen?
It’s ironic that Blofeld switches the word ‘charms’ for ‘alarms’, a Freudian slip that signifies he is utterly distracted by Tracy. He doesn’t see through the subterfuge of Draco and Bond and he doesn’t hear the alarm bells ringing until it’s too late. It’s entirely appropriate for Blofeld to make an allusion to the idealised love between the Trojan Paris and Helen who, in some versions of the myth, is kept captive against her will behind the walls of Troy, just as Tracy is kept in the gilded cage of Piz Gloria.
Classical allusions and poetry are rife in Raven’s work, but they’re not something we immediately associate with Bond himself. In Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, Bond hazily recalls the extent of his classical learning to Tiger Tanaka, during a discussion about poetry. He tells Tanaka that his education was “Mostly in Latin and Greek. All about Caesar and Balbus and so on. Absolutely no help in ordering a cup of coffee in Rome or Athens after I'd left school.” Despite being privately-educated, the fictional Bond is more like those of who weren’t taught to memorise large chunks of poetry.
That doesn’t mean the other characters can’t start reciting however - including the future Mrs Bond.
The second poem invoked by Raven is a set speech from a play by James Elroy Flecker, Hassan: The Story of Hassan of Baghdad and How he Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand. In the speech, almost midway through the play, the minstrel in the court of a tyrannical Caliph talks his boss out of killing him by appealing to his ego:
Thy dawn, O Master of the world, thy dawn;
The hour the lilies open on the lawn,
The hour the grey wings pass beyond the mountains,
The hour of silence, when we hear the fountains,
The hour that dreams are brighter and winds colder,
The hour that young love wakes on a white shoulder,
O Master of the world, the Persian Dawn.
That hour, O Master, shall be bright for thee:
Thy merchants chase the morning down the sea,
The braves who fight thy war unsheathe the sabre,
The slaves who work thy mines are lashed to labour,
For thee the waggons of the world are drawn -
The ebony of night, the red of dawn!
Although the version spoken by Tracy is heavily altered from the original, it maintains the rhyming couplet structure and narratively performs a similar function: falsely flattering a despot. In this instance, however, Tracy is not begging for her life but keeping Blofeld enraptured so Draco and Bond gain the advantage they need:
Thy dawn, O Master of the World, thy dawn
For thee the sunlight creeps across the lawn.
For thee the ships are drawn down to the waves.
For thee the markets throng with myriad slaves.
For thee the hammer on the anvil rings.
For thee the poet of beguilement sings.
Enchantingly delivered by RSC veteran Diana Rigg, it’s little that wonder Blofeld doesn’t realise he’s under attack until it’s too late.
And lest anyone doubt the power of poetry, another excerpt of Flecker’s, taken from the same play, is inscribed on the clock tower of the Special Air Service’s regiment headquarters in Hereford, UK:
We are the Pilgrims, master; we shall go
Always a little further; it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow
Across that angry or that glimmering sea.
Anyone joining the SAS, the most elite regiment of the British Army, must memorise these lines as part of their training. Presumably, the SAS aren’t expecting to have to seduce enemy agents and keep them offguard with passionate poetry. And it’s probably not a good idea to bring a poem to a gunfight, although I suppose if you’re in the SAS you have to be ready for any eventuality. As the motto goes: Who Dares Wins, a sentiment Simon Raven would surely have approved of.
Tracy’s seduction of Blofeld is such a masterful scene because we know there is no way in hell she is being sincere. Diana Rigg’s performance sells it but the words themselves are key. Even if we aren’t aware of their provenance or precise meaning while we’re watching, we get the gist. Having neither character speak more plainly puts this fake courtship steadfastly in the realm of artifice. In complete contrast, Tracy’s final words, those she speaks to Bond as he unhooks the garlands from the Aston Martin, are disarmingly innocent, without a hint of guile.
Tracy: He loves me...
Bond: Instinctively.
Tracy: Infuriatingly.
Bond: Intensely.
Tracy: In...
Together: In...
Bond: In?
Tracy: In?
Bond: Indubitably.
Tracy: First a boy, then a girl…
It’s poetry of a different kind: What, after all, is poetry but a more than usual attention being paid to choosing the right words? Bond films may be action-oriented, but On Her Majesty’s Secret Service pays more than the usual attention to the power of words - and is all the more seductive because of it.
Thank you to Ben Williams and Alex Miller for their assistance with this piece.
This article on MI6-HQ was a useful starting point: https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/articles/ohmss-poem
