Jamaica’s creative refuge

Could the dreamy resort that inspired every James Bond book be my muse too?

It’s a spring day on Oracabessa Bay’s secluded Button Beach, and the sun is liberally tossing its morning diamonds on a breeze-ruffled sea. A man of a certain age — tall and lean and tanned — emerges from the surf with the kind of easeful confidence I can only describe as Bond-ian.

“Did you have a good swim?” Omar, a hotel staffer, asks the man, offering him a plush towel. “Omar, I’ve never had a bad swim at GoldenEye,” the man replies, smiling. It’s a scene that seems lifted from a 007 movie, that moment of glamour and pleasure and leisure before Bond gets the call from MI6.

GoldenEye, spread over 52 luxuriant acres on Jamaica’s north coast, owes its name to Ian Fleming. In 1946, the Naval Intelligence officer bought the land (formerly a donkey racetrack) and proceeded to sketch his dream holiday house on desk blotter.

With more self-confidence than architectural savoir faire, Fleming designed the villa, which remains discreetly perched high above the sea, amid a tropical fantasia of palms and fruit trees. At a simple desk in his high-ceilinged bedroom, replete with glassless, louvred, breeze-welcoming windows, Fleming penned all of his James Bond books — the storylines and characters as improbable as the beauty of their birthplace.

Fleming later mused about his books and their provenance: “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.”

Writing tends to require a degree of self-isolation, the space — literal, emotional, etc. — to presumably rummage the corridors of the soul. As the late novelist, biographer and memoirist Francine du Plessix Gray said: “The whole thing about writing is how to be able to withstand solitude.” It seems to me that I could withstand it quite nicely at GoldenEye.

I’ve long been fascinated by (slash wildly jealous of ) the kind of writer who expresses a need to write. I wish I felt as urgent a need to write as I do a need to avoid it. My laziness will now inspire me to reach for a quote from the late, great Nora Ephron, who said, “The hardest part about writing is writing.”

When I finally get myself to write, generally when pursued by a deadline, I need to be properly caffeinated, it can’t be too early or too late, my surroundings should be wellwindowed, light-glutted, the sun at the right angle to the moon, etc. It occurs to me that identifying the right location is an exercise in procrastination management — the right setting serves as a sort of redaction of excuses.

Fleming, of course, was not the only author or artist to require a particular setup. Balzac reputedly ate a huge meal at five in the afternoon, then slept till midnight, at which point he rose to write at a small desk in his room for 16 hours. I prefer the approach favoured by Neil Simon, who evidently could only write his plays from a specific bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music for “Sunset Boulevard” at the Hotel Bel-Air. Meanwhile, Tennessee Williams wrote all his later works in a suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée.

There are so many examples, I could write a book about this — if only I had a bungalow of my own. I’ll admit that I am in the (extraordinarily slow and long) process of writing a draft of a book on another topic.

Obviously, what stands between me and a completed oeuvre is a sublime villa, a diet of sunshine and perfect Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and perhaps a writing desk facing an ever-glittering sea. So, when I checked into GoldenEye for a few days, I toyed with the brief fantasy (delusion) that I would use the time to find my muse.

The boutique, haute-rustic hideaway, now owned by former record producer Chris Blackwell, remains the stuff of fantasy. A protected lagoon, green as molten malachite, ribbons its way around the property, sequined in sunshine. The champagne-coloured sands on half-moon-shaped Low Cay beach are as satiny as a Bond girl evening dress.

There are also palm trees bejewelled in coconuts, rocky outcrops, and British tourists (all of whom, incredibly, look like Sienna Miller) wafting around in block-print caftans and straw bucket hats. But mostly there is a surfeit of sky and sea, the vastness like its own blank page, making the property feel like an infinite, open-air atelier.

But in a slight plot twist, I ended up travelling with my husband and eight-year-old son, which somewhat ruined the solitude-andmuse-meeting narrative. I did not bang out 2,000 words a day, as Fleming did, on a gold-plated Royal Quiet Deluxe typewriter. (Said typewriter was auctioned off in 1995, and in classic Bond style, its whereabouts are unknown.)

If the whereabouts of my own completed manuscript remain unknown, I did enjoy a swim of my dreams in the lagoon’s warm emerald waters and lounged on Low Cay and Button Beach. If this place is basically the world’s most delightful plein-air writer’s room, it is also a paradise for procrastination. I’ll write on my next visit here — You Only Live Twice.

Obviously, what stands between me and a completed

oeuvre is a sublime villa, a diet of sunshine and perfect Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, and perhaps a writing desk facing an everglittering sea