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This is a guest post by Stephen Bloomfield

Robert Harling? Steel Magnolias and The First Wives Club? American playwright, actor and film producer?

No – not that one.

This one: Robert Harling, British author of eighteen titles (fiction and non-fiction) and variously a bookseller, printer, Royal Navy Reserve officer, advertising executive, typographer, veteran magazine editor and cloak-and-dagger commando. And, just possibly, one of the many candidates whose qualities came together to form James Bond in the mind of Ian Fleming. (He certainly has a good claim to this, since he and Fleming were friends of long-standing.)

Harling’s name has fallen out of public recognition. He would have been — even at his peak — a mid-list author, although sufficiently strong-selling that one publisher stuck with him throughout his writing career (and he with them, of course): all of his novels were published originally by Chatto & Windus.

Among other things, Harling had been a writer and typographer and enthusiastic amateur sailor before joining the Royal Navy Reserve at the outbreak of the Second World War. After the war, between 1951 and 1979, he wrote seven very good novels mostly dealing with journalism or having backgrounds based in the newspaper world. They were not quite thrillers, not quite literary fiction but certainly not pulp. Grahame Greene would probably have called them ‘entertainments”.

He also wrote eleven other non-fiction works, including two published before the war, on subjects as diverse as: the typography of Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden (both books being regarded as authoritative still); typographic styles; London by-ways; and famous homes and gardens.

His ability to present information cogently, his friendship and not least his wartime exploits – first in charge of a whaler off the beaches of Dunkirk, then as navigating officer on corvettes assigned to convoy duties in the Western Approaches and the Mediterranean – culminated in him being recruited by Ian Fleming to join 30 Independent Assault Unit, which undertook all sorts of specialist tasks towards the end of the war, with minimal official sanction and maximum dash and daring. He and Fleming had met at a book launch party just before the war.

After the war, Harling became a design adviser to newspapers (including The Times where he held a long-standing consultancy) and then joined Homes and Garden magazine, where he stayed as editor for twenty–eight years, nurturing a band of young journalists into distinguished authorities on cooking, interior design and gardening.

He was also a fabulist.

It was only on his death in 2008 at the age of 98 that it became apparent that much of the story of his early life had been a fiction he’d invented.

Far from being an only child orphaned young and brought up by an aunt and uncle in Brighton (the story he had told even his children), he and his brother had been brought up in Islington. His father was a taxi driver and he had married (and divorced) early. Many of his family relationships he Harling concealed, for unknown, and unknowable, reasons.

It does appear that he ran a bookshop in Holborn briefly, but whether as proprietor or manager is unclear. He spent some time at the Daily Mail but then left to work as a printer in two specialist printing houses. By the beginning of the war, he had begun to develop a reputation as a minor authority on typefaces as editor of the journal Typography. He developed at least three new typefaces which have endured and on his death was described in the Times obituary as ‘the most innovative and distinguished typographer of the last century’. Some claim!

Aside from his typographical expertise, Harling is worth remembering for a number of his books. The Amateur Sailor and The Steep Atlantick Stream, the two he wrote about his time at sea, are the equal and possible superiors of The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, one of the most famous books about the Royal Navy in the Second World War. The Cruel Sea is not presented as anything but fiction and drew heavily on Monsarrat’s conversations with fellow officers in addition to his own experiences as an officer in corvettes and frigates in the Battle of the North Atlantic. One of the turning points in the novel, for example, comes when the ship Compass Rose is torpedoed. None of Monsarrat’s ships was torpedoed, and this stunning feat of plot and descriptive writing is all derived from second-hand information, possibly from someone involved in the sinking of HMS Firedrake in 1942.

The Cruel Sea, both the 1951 book and the 1953 film, was responsible for weaving into British boyhoods the myths and legends of the Second World War. It is without doubt, a great piece of writing that conveys the terror, stress and exhaustion of fighting a long, dogged war with the both the sea and human foes as the perpetual enemy. Harling’s books do the same, if perhaps less showily. They are less obviously fiction — although given his propensity to invent it cannot be held that they are entirely autobiographical. They are probably heavily embellished fact. They also avoid the serious flaw of Monsarrat’s book — a sub-plot of love interest in the second half of the book which grates oddly with the intensity of the main story and, far from acting as counter-point, distracts from the overall impact of the book.

The other candidates for burnishing his neglected memory are his novels based in Fleet Street – the ‘old’ Fleet street of hot metal printing and larger than life reporters and editors, particularly The Paper Palace and The Hollow Sunday.

The Paper Palace, written in 1951, was Harling’s first ‘civilian’ novel and his first venture into obvious fiction. The story concerns a columnist tasked by his editor, much against his objections, to uncover the reasons behind an obituary about a Communist written by a very capitalist newspaper proprietor – in fact their newspaper proprietor. This bare plot is the means of erecting a very satisfactory scaffolding about a power struggle between the editor and the proprietor, with the columnist being the instrument by which the duel is (partially) resolved. It is an exemplary ‘Fleet Street’ novel with the relationships between the two antagonists superbly described through the experiences of the columnist.

His second novel, The Dark Saviour (1952) continues the Fleet Street theme with a New York correspondent (who may or may not be the same man) being told by his London office to investigate an evangelistic, mystical revolutionary whose emotional appeal to the population is threatening the stability of a Caribbean island — run mostly for an elite. There are multiple betrayals between the characters and, like the correspondent, the reader is never quite sure whom to trust.

The Enormous Shadow (1955) is more obviously towards the thriller end of the spectrum; the denouement is much more ‘actionist’ than the previous two novels he had written to that date. The main protagonist is again a newspaper columnist (this time a recalled Washington correspondent) who is asked to pursue the story of the disappearance of a conscience-stricken atomic scientist. The scandal of the defections of Burgess and Maclean in 1951 were still in the front of the public memory and the novel draws on a similar context. As with the previous novel, there is a love-interest element, well-handled, which is central to the story.

The background to The Endless Colonnade (1958) departs from the world of journalism, having as its protagonist a holidaying physician taking his first holiday after the death of his wife. Meeting an attractive Italian woman who flirts with him turns into an affair. She entrusts him with a secret that may endanger both of them; needless to say, the female character is a foundation for the entirety of the story. The format of the novel is also different from the previous three being much more like a journal written by the protagonist than a third person omniscient narrator. Without spoiling the story, the conclusion is melancholy and much like an ending of a Greene novel.

The Hollow Sunday (1967) returns very successfully to Fleet Street and is occasionally cited (by journalists) as being one of the best of the genre, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop and Michael Frayn’s Toward the End of the Morning. The plot concerns the introduction of new technology into the printing of newspapers and how that will up-end the economics of the business. It is another ‘power-struggle’ story with politics and adultery thrown in for good measure. The characters are both well-drawn and likeable/dislikeable as required.

The Athenian Widow (1974) continues the investigative reporter theme — not a door-stepping tabloid man but a more genteel and refined exponent of the subtly pointed question and thorough, but discreet, research. It deals with issues of truth and journalistic responsibility. Somewhat flatter than the other Fleet Street books he wrote, it is slower in both development and outcome but no less gripping on its own terms.

Finally, in 1979, came The Summer Portrait, his last novel. Harling departed radically from previous themes and chose as the main character a painter on the verge of fame who paints the portraits of two very different people as summer commissions. Through them he has love affairs, all the while caught on the dilemma of whether to commit himself to one lover, or not. It is a very satisfying read, although much slower perhaps in some ways than anything else he wrote but, again, the conclusion is almost Greene-like.

In all his books, Harling’s writing is fluid, well-paced and engaging. He is a craftsman: he does not write bad sentences; the conversations and dialogue are well-enough handled — even at the distance of thirty, forty or fifty years — to be realistic and not stilted; though, admittedly, some of the words used to describe characters might now be regarded as unusable and the concepts about the dynamics of relationships (particularly between men and women) are very much of their time.

Harling was a psychological writer rather than one who relied on twists in the plot to drive books forward. What marks out his books is the psychological depth to the descriptions of his characters — going deeper into motivations and thoughts than simply skating along on plot and action. But the analysis is not so deep or introverted to be a drag on the plot and always relevant to the decisions that the characters take. . They are not flat cut-outs responding to the plot but rather the plot is pushed on by the psychological foibles, strengths and weaknesses – even the moral dilemmas — of the characters.

Harling was able to write convincingly about the effects of the demons which drove others to do things that they were often not proud of or had to defend against their own consciences and others’ criticisms. He probably conveyed much of himself through his novels in writing about the way his characters behaved.

Engagingly, Harling writes very well about women (at least from a male reader’s perspective). Although they conform to a certain type throughout his novels they are substantial and rounded characters. Their contributions to the plot are never peripheral and most often are central. This might be seen as unusual given the time in which he is writing. Harling’s female characters might not be as forceful as those of some modern authors but they are far more than the decorative ciphers of say, his great friend Fleming or any of the other fifties/sixties thriller writers like Maclean or even Innes..

None of his books were made into films (although The Paper Palace and The Enormous Shadow were both adapted into tv plays, one with Denholm Elliott in the lead role) – which may explain to some extent their lack of longevity in the public’s interest. Given the psychological complexity of Harling’s male central characters, it is an interesting parlour game to speculate who might have played them if the films had been made: Cary Grant is an obvious candidate for the suave, worldly columnist of, say, The Paper Palace. But generally he is a little too smooth for anything else. James Mason is sufficiently hard-edged for at least three of the stories perhaps but doesn’t have the crucial self-doubt that Harling’s central characters often display. Connery might have pulled it off more often than not – especially in The Enormous Shadow and The Athenian Widow. The tough one to cast would have been The Hollow Sunday. All of the male central characters are self-doubters to some extent, analytical of their own motives and very much the dissectors of the behaviour of others, which is why the books are such good reads.

Harling was not universally popular as a colleague. Not particularly gregarious, he shunned his own (secretly-prepared) retirement party from The Times with a rude remark about such affairs being nauseating. He admitted that some of the sparkle went out of his life when Fleming died. But he also found fierce devotees in the staff of House and Garden, some of whom – the cookery writer Elizabeth David for example – became famous in their own right after being taken on by the magazine.

Perhaps his attempts to conceal his background – successful until after his death – fostered his reluctance to talk much about himself, lest he betray his story. The last book he wrote – Ian Fleming: A Personal Memoir — was completed by his daughter and published posthumously. The title was probably chosen to capitalise on the cult of Bond, since it is mostly about Harling rather than Fleming (although it does reveal something of Fleming’s sexual proclivities in passing).

The book is something of an essay at autobiography, dealing extensively with Harling’s exploits in 30 Assault Unit. But even in this he could not bring himself to tell the complete truth about his past. Perhaps, having spun the story that long (he died at the age of 98), it had become more real than the truth – so “print the legend”.

Keeping people at arms length is one way of concealing one’s own history. And private people often listen well and become the most acute evaluators of others foibles, since they are testing themselves against what they see in others and vice versa. Writing then becomes a way of explaining personalities.

But few people who do those things can write as well as Harling did.

Robert Harling
27 March 1910 – 1 July 2008

As an ex-journalist and writer of academic texts, Stephen Bloomfield is baffled why so many excellent books become neglected.