Book review: Being a Scot by Sean Connery - edicts of the last king of Scotland
30-Aug-2008 • Actor News
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In that it is impossibly handsome, and in that it steadfastly, infuriatingly, refuses to be quite what we want it to be, this long-awaited book is that rare beast: an autobiography that absolutely mirrors its subject.
After years of fraught negotiation, and courteous but unmistakably final fallings-out with two ghost-writers who wanted to clatter the pans by lifting too many lids on the broth of Connery's life, he went with an old friend, Scottish film-maker and polymath Murray Grigor. The result is safe but valiantly surprising, and deeply rewarding if you want to learn about being a Scot, and how that nation's thrawn, contradictory psyche was born from a savage, short, brilliant Enlightenment and a crushing postwar malaise. But it is deeply disappointing if you're just a Bond fan. Or a gossip fan. Or a film fan. Or even if you simply want to know what makes the big man tick.
As he has always done, Connery calls the shots. He decided he didn't want to dish the dirt on himself or on anyone else. So there are precious few anecdotes and they're tantalisingly brief. It is a quite wilful swerve from what might have been expected: something about the women, about infidelity, perhaps more than one paragraph on the viciousness of the Scottish press. It's not that he doesn't mention the elephant in the room. He and Grigor simply don't acknowledge the possibility of elephants.
Check the (sprawling, eclectic) index under T and you will find Turner. You might, legitimately, in Connery's only autobiography, expect at least a passing mention of 'Turner, Lana' and the impossibly other-age story of his on-set headbutting of feared Mafia hitman Johnny 'Stompy' Stompanato to defend her honour. Sadly, but not strangely, no. The only Turner mentioned is JMW and his early 'misty tartan proto-Impressionism'. Rather than a glorious Hollywood Babylon through the eyes of a former Fountainbridge milkman, what we get is a lecture: on art, architecture, history, music, drainage, cartooning.
But that is not, astonishingly, to its discredit. He does it well. You can, among the sumptuous etchings and photos, begin to discern the key to the man and it is this: autodidacticism. He freely admits his jaunty early ignorance, his debt to near-forgotten directors who ordered him to pick up Turgenev, Proust, Joyce, Ibsen, Stanislavski (of course). Anecdotes attest to how ungladly he suffered his own foolishness: buying a reel-to-reel Grundig 'to hear how heavily accented my voice really was' or 'wondering how you could play an intelligent person if you were stupid and vice versa'.
There is an old-Scottish voice, the tone of the dominie, to many of his enthusiastic lectures: a dislike of trends, buzz-words, fads; a reverence for achievement and discovery; precious little pause to reflect, forgive or wallow. Those who choose to carp may wonder whether the knowledge is all his own and certainly some of Scotland's finest artistic and historical minds are given end-page acknowledgments, but the slightly pedantic tone of the text reeks of the self-taught man, and one in fact who's still up to storming speed with the modern age, and the precise names behind his home country's skylines, theatres, newspapers. Privilege is not his favourite word. Rare opprobrium is reserved for Blair and Mandelson, as he casually reveals he still knows more about the formation of the party he admits he should by rights belong to - Labour - than do the usurpers.
Even if you accept that this series of exuberant lectures is all you're going to get from Sean - and it is, in a phrase I'm sure he'd loathe, a big ask - there are a couple of problems. The book is strangely ill-served, given the brilliance of the rest of the design, by a back-page quote from John Huston that manages to both demean and vainglorify its subject: 'I wish for Chrissake that Sean Connery would become King of Scotland'. This will simply stir up those who want to mention Bahamian exile or who remember his infamous comments about slapping women (unmentioned here, although he has gone, if reluctantly, on the record and stood by them).
A clearer timeline, and some simple context, would have made this an even better read. There is a lurch, as we move straight from his first, thrilling pay cheque for acting into lengthy chapters about Ossian and Macbeth, and he only reconnects with his film world in infuriatingly casual fits and starts. But there's no doubt that Sean Connery does know, still, what it means to be a Scot. To be able to douse the shortbread myths of what Tom Nairn has called 'kailyard sentimentality' means knowing them, and half-loving them, in the first place.
He talks, at one stage, of a friend sending him a card with this seasonal inscription: 'In case you're having a merry Christmas, just remember where you came from.' Another very Scottish trait. I remember a fishwife in Aberdeen telling me why her lobsters needed no lid on the pan. 'They're all Scottish. One of them climbs near the top, the ithers'll pull him right back in.'
Actually, Connery's biggest triumph may well be to remind many Scots where they come from. There'll be a lot of fathers this Christmas, bemusedly struggling - actually, wafting, for many of these pages do sing you along - through Tolstoy, curling, architecture, Ivor Cutler and the Mozart/Burns parallels, and the better they will be for it. Still. At one stage, before this gentleman leaves us, it would be good to get the full Lana Turner story.
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