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Being a Scot
This quirky account of an innovative industrial initiative — which momentarily turned confrontational "Red Clydeside" shipworkers into co-operative Japanese — style "colleagues" — was made in the same year that Connery was blowing Blofeld away, astride his yellow death-dealing mini-copter in You Only Live Twice. So we should pause before wondering why one of the most celebrated movie stars should put his name to such a cerebral book as this. There’s a consistency in Connery’s seriousness about Scotland, which the septuagenarian wants decisively to nail to the flagpole particularly in these febrile times for the Union. Yet the intriguing thing about Being A Scot — which makes it more than just an intellectual vanity project — is the definition of Scottishness it plays with. Connery’s Scotland is "a country where the invention of tradition is in itself a tradition", where "fakelore and folklore" should be equally valued. From a hard-scrabble, footie-mad working-class boy who literally constructed his acting persona — through body-building, listening to his voice on tapes, and a voracious auto-didacticism — there’s an even deeper consistency here. The Connery who played the role of Ian Fleming’s sadistic, hyper-English super-snob James Bond is hardly unaware of the lie that tells the truth. As the archive pictures show, with Connery alongside the likes of Umberto Eco, Joseph Beuys, Edinburgh gallerist Richard Demarco and Buckminster Fuller, the ex-milkman from Fountainbridge has some talent for creative and bohemian association. And never more evident than in his choice of collaborator, Murray Grigor. Grigor is one of those cultural intellectuals for whom the centrality of Scotland to the development of modern times — for good and for ill, destructively and creatively, in its Enlightenment and "Endarkenment" — is enough to occupy the entirety of his life. So, as he puts it, Grigor has "followed Connery’s requests down the byways of Scottish history", and come up with a picture of Scottish being which is more like a Scottish becoming — an unruly narrative of chancers and artificers, bricoleurs and imagineers, for the most part simply enjoying the tumultuous ride of industrialism, imperialism and decline. Connery, who is never one to be over modest, tells us: "just as the industrial base of the country was falling apart in the 1960s, there I was as James Bond, promoting British inventiveness, armed with advanced technologies and increasingly innovative gizmos". "British" isn’t an accidental reference here: as his acceptance of a knighthood shows, Connery (as part of a long Scottish tradition) knows how to play the British state to advantage. Yet the Scotland Connery seeks to release from the carapace of the Union, according to these history lessons, is quite a strange country — equally anxious about its authenticity and inauthenticity, and happily proclaiming the very authenticity of inauthenticity. One chapter is devoted to Connery’s obsession with the "true" Macbeth — not just the bad-luck "Scottish play", but the historical record of a monarch more the stable ruler of a peaceful kingdom than Shakespeare’s "self-destructing butcher". Others rail away at the distortion of the Rosslyn Chapel’s meaning via The Da Vinci Code, or bemoan the architectural illiteracy of Edinburgh planners in ignoring native Scottish building traditions. But subsequent chapters go into rhapsodies about what can only be described as the Scottish spectacular — fakery as, indeed, a "national tradition". There are eulogies to Sir Walter Scott as the inventor of Tartan Scotland — bedecking Edinburgh in plaid and composing kitsch "Highland" rituals for the state visit of George IV in 1822, like some Chinese Olympic ceremony organiser. The "Ossian" phenomenon in the 18th century — James Macpherson passed off his epic poem of Celtic mysticism as a "recently discovered" Gaelic text — is re-asserted as a key moment of Romanticism. Everyone from Goethe and Mendelssohn to Napoleon raved over the Ossian texts, in which noble savages and runic bards "surrendered their senses in preference to reason". That Scots are brilliant at hyping their historical record for commercial and political ends isn’t something you would expect to see in an SNP ministerial speech anytime soon. Nevertheless, all this scholarship does begin to sound like Connery’s bid — while his health holds and while the independence bandwagon rolls — for some kind of official role in the country’s public affairs. As this fulsomely illustrated volume displays, Connery comes from an era where the masculine ironies of TV series like Mad Men or Life on Mars were taken deadly straight. Connery grins in front of the Forth Road Bridge, shares a pint with his father’s pals. And he evinces a strong sense of what the Australians call "mateship" — hustling a coterie of other men (including Grigor) through projects. It’s a kind of arty, tweed-dressed version of the Rat Pack, all benefiting from Hollywood stardom. One wonders whether this "lads together" approach, however high-minded, is what we need as the animating spirit of Scottish governance. Being sophisticatedly aware of the contradictions of Scottish identity is one thing. Being unwilling to address their worst manifestations, quite another. By arrangement with The Independent
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If
nothing else, Sean Connery has always been alive to the gloomy dualities
of Scottish culture, as these opening lines to his self-directed 1967
documentary, The Bowler and the Bunnet, confirm: "The
country of the extremes/ Love of life/ Hatred of life/ Poets and
murderers/ Rigid temperance and savage drinking/ John Knox and Johnny
Walker/ Sturdy democracy and savage class hatred/ Warm hearts and idiot
violence".