Ian Fleming's Kitzbühel holiday and On Her Majesty's Secret Service

The Spring 1965 number of The Book Collector, coming almost a year after his death, included a personal memoir of Ian Fleming by Percy Muir, the bibliophile and bookseller who helped put together Fleming's collection of 'books that had started something'. Part of the memoir is reproduced in the special edition of the journal devoted to Ian Fleming.

One of the many fascinating aspects of the memoir is an account of a summer holiday that Percy Muir and Ian Fleming spent together in Austria in, I think, 1930. Muir explains that Fleming was attending the university at Geneva and in the June invited him over. Muir duly arrived in Geneva and stayed with Fleming in his flat before they headed to Kitzbühel. Muir writes that the holiday was a 'riotous success'.

As I was reading the memoir, I couldn't help wonder whether I was seeing the origins of certain aspects of On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Obviously the holiday was in the summer, so there was no skiing (and in any case, neither of them would climb any mountains), but Fleming had learnt to ski in Kitzbühel (he was competition standard by the age of 21), and the novel is imbued with his own experiences.

It's the minor details in the memoir that particularly interest me. Percy Muir tells us that Ian Fleming's Geneva flat was a two-bedroomed place over a ski-workshop. There is, of course, a ski-workshop in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Presumably, one ski-workshop looks pretty much like another, and Fleming's likely to have seen a few, but he might have been thinking of the one he lived over when he wrote the passage in which James Bond enters a ski-workshop at Piz Gloria and surreptitiously takes a thin plastic strip.

Then there's Percy Muir's recollections of Ian Fleming's social life in Kitzbühel. He recalls that Fleming was 'extremely fond of women and was constantly entangled with them' and had three 'entanglements' at the resort. If ski resorts and female company were inextricably linked in Fleming's mind, then it's no coincidence that in On Her Majesty's Secret Service – more than in any other Bond novel – Bond is himself surrounded by women ('Ten Gorgeous Girls', as Fleming describes them).
 

Bond with the 'Angels of Death'. An OHMSS lobby card

These connections are admittedly slight, but considering also the opening of the book with Bond's memories of childhood beach holidays, it is nevertheless not to hard to gain the impression that On Her Majesty's Secret Service is one of Fleming's most personal books.