Book review: Being a Scot by Sean Connery

Being a Scot by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor - The Sunday Times review by Christopher Hart.

A multimillionaire socialist, a republican knight of the realm, a proud Scotsman and an active Scottish nationalist, long-resident in the tax haven of the Bahamas, Sir Sean Connery is indeed a man of many surprises and contradictions.

A fresh surprise is sprung by this long-awaited autobiography, which turns out not to be an autobiography at all. It's called Being a Scot, not Being Sean Connery, and with good reason. Anyone expecting something like David Niven's incomparable The Moon's a Balloon is going to be sadly disappointed, for there are no hilarious anecdotes, brilliant portraits of Hollywood greats or outrageous personal confessions here.

There is an opening chapter quickly sketching Connery's early years, and his rise from animal-handsome milkman to world-famous film star. He was born in Fountainbridge, “which sounds rather Arcadian”, but which, in reality, was one of the poorest areas of Edinburgh. Auld Reekie in its pre-tourist days is vividly evoked, when the haar, the sea fog off the Forth, lay thick over the town and the smell “savoured daily was at once sweet, porridge-like and pungent, as it poured out from the combined chimneys of a toffee factory, brewery and rubber mill”. The Connerys were certainly poor by contemporary standards, but as a former neighbour recently put it to him, “since we didn't have social workers to tell us that we were deprived, we were all as happy as pigs”.

And then we plunge headlong into a series of lengthy and scholarly chapters each with a title suggesting a doctoral thesis by some particularly earnest and bespectacled cultural studies student. Scotch Myths and Realities: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, or The Forging of Scotland: The Reassembly of Cultural Ruins. It makes for a detailed, fascinating and beautifully designed study of Scottish culture and identity, as represented by such luminaries as Walter Scott, Robert Burns, “Ossian” and so on.

It is also a great test of the reader's intellectual snobbery. An unlikable little voice keeps saying, Can this really be the work of a former milkman, who left school at the age of 13? But even though it is co-written with the writer and film-maker Murray Grigor, there can be no doubt that this is essentially Connery's work, as claimed, and not some monstrous monument to a pampered film star's deluded vanity. You can hear his voice throughout, distinctly prickly, quick to criticise, and unapologetically proud of what he and his country have achieved.

Connery is neither vain nor arrogant, but it is that intense personal pride - self-respect, in the old working-class sense - that has made him the way he is. Physically he wasn't anything special until he started working on himself at the Dunedin amateur weight-lifting club. Soon he had the body of a young Charles Atlas and was modelling for life classes at the Edinburgh College of Art.

Intellectually, too, he was way behind until a fellow actor gave him a reading list. Before long, he was visiting public libraries whenever possible, and making his way through Ibsen and Thomas Wolfe (he particularly loved Look Homeward, Angel), Hemingway, Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy and Turgenev. Such a programme “greatly increased my confidence and self-esteem. It gave a balance to my life and a better identity, just as body-building had done for me physically”.

You can hear his no-nonsense voice in the midst of a learned discussion of the iconography of Rosslyn Chapel. He recalls discussing the “sheer daftness of Knights Templar lore” with his friend Umberto Eco during the filming of The Name of the Rose, “as our arses froze to the stone pews of the monastery of Kloster Eberbach”.

You can hear his indignation when he falls into conversation with an Edinburgh University literature student on a plane reading Crime and Punishment, and they speculate on Raskol-nikov's psychology. But hasn't she read James Hogg's similar, earlier and arguably much better Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a masterpiece of the English language? No she hasn't, because it's by a Scot, and Scottish literature has its own department. He is angry at this kind of cultural cringe and self-neglect, exasperated with the Scottish love of failure and exaggerated relish of the dark side. The definitive modern Scottish film, after all, is still Trainspotting, about a group of washed-up junkies in Leith. You can now go on coach tours of Leith to visit the film's low spots, he notes with audible disgust.

Like many a passionate autodidact, Connery wants us to know what he has learnt, and there are quotations here from everyone from Dante to James Joyce. When he receives the freedom of the City of Edinburgh, he is humbled to be the latest in a line that includes Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens and Nelson Mandela. And he is keen to list his support of various campaign groups, charities and universities, and his co-founding of the Scottish International Education Trust with his wages from the Bond film Diamonds Are Forever.

There is hardly a word about James Bond, however, apart from a wry reminder that, as well as playing 007, to avoid what he calls “bondage fatigue”, he has done other stuff. He has been in rotten films, like any movie actor, but the best of them - The Hill, The Man Who Would Be King, The Name of the Rose, The Untouchables - are fine works. And he knows it.

Being a Scot is Connery's personal contribution to the reawakening of Scottish national consciousness and cultural pride; and possibly a job application. John Huston, the film director, is quoted large on the back cover saying, “As long as actors are going into politics I wish for Chrissake that Sean Connery would become King of Scotland.” Except this knight wants to “banish all forms of feudality in Scotland”, and King Sean doesn't sound quite right. But President Connery does have a certain ring to it...

Delivers the goods
Connery's unfeigned delight in discovering more about his country - and himself - gives his book its idiosyncratic charm. While delving in the archives of the National Library of Scotland for the heart-breaking last letter written by Mary Queen of Scots six hours before her execution, he learns the archivist has found a still more extraordinary document: one of Connery's first pay slips as a 13-year-old delivery boy for St Cuthbert's dairy, Edinburgh. The slip records his title ‘the Costorphine Dairy barrow worker' and his 1944 salary (a guinea a week). Within weeks, he had a horse of his own to drive. ‘ME! I couldn't grasp it, I was so elated.'

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