LET’S START WITH A list of the most famous individuals associated with certain nations. In some cases the “most famous person” is a fictional character; in some cases he or she is a real person, but either way they represent some essential quality of the nation concerned. Here we go:
• Scotland: Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, the Engineer in Star Trek. A Canadian.
• America: George Washington. An Englishman.1
• Russia: Stalin. A Georgian.
• Australia: Mad Max. An American.
• Germany: Hitler. An Austrian.
• India: Apu from the Simpsons. A scrap of transparent animation plastic “cell” painted with acrylics in Korea and voiced by an American.
• England: James Bond. An Englishman. At last! Or—then again, perhaps not. Let’s be honest: Think of James Bond and we think of a Scot first and foremost (you’re picturing him now: the famous face, the Scottish burr, “Mish Moneypenny . . . ”). Then there was an Australian. Then an Englishman, but nobody took him very seriously. Then an Irishman, who did a much better job. All these actors were playing a character created by a Jamaican resident of Scottish descent.
Something seems to be going wrong here. Let’s take a step back. What about the other candidates for most famous Englishman, real or fictional? How about Saint George, England’s patron saint? (He was a Turk.) King Arthur? (Most likely a Roman.) How about William the Conqueror? (A Frenchman.) J. R. R. Tolkien? (Born in South Africa.) Prince Charles? (He’s prince of Wales, not England.)2 Tony Blair? (Scottish.)
Okay: Are there any Englishmen at all in the building?
I’ll hold up my hand. I’m English. I was born in Croydon, which is a palatial and utopian stretch of urban development to the south and the east of central London—I invite you to Google the name and check for yourself. I grew up in the southeast of England, and that’s where I now live. I am thoroughly English. I’m polite to everybody, and especially polite to people I dislike. I watch football.3 I drink alcohol. I am middle-class.
Let’s not quibble. Of course James Bond is English. Who could possibly deny it? Fleming was clear about his fictional character’s nationality. The next actor in line to play him, steel-eyed pobble-complexioned Daniel Craig, is English. And most importantly of all, James Bond embodies precisely those qualities that make an Englishman English. Look, I’ll prove it to you.
Here’s a second (and as it happens penultimate) list. This time it itinerizes what Bond’s typical Englishness tells us about the characteristics of the typical Englishman:
1. He kills people for a living.
2. He has a great deal of sex with women.
3. He is extremely handsome and dresses extremely well.
4. He never loses his cool.
5. He’s got a whole lot of gadgets. A whole lot. Man, he’s practically Captain Gadget.
Let’s take these one at a time.
One thing Englishmen have proven themselves rather talented at over the last four hundred years is killing people. Start drawing up a list of nations with whom England has been at war at some point in our long history, and you’ll quickly realize that it would be simpler to come up with a list of countries with whom we haven’t been at war. (Such a list would include Antarctica, Munchkinland, and the geologically ancient continent of Pangaea). About a century ago a third of the globe was ruled by England. By “ruled” I mean that Englishmen had gone to these places and killed people until they’d agreed to become part of the British Empire. It’s a striking thought: England is a tiny nation, without a great deal to recommend it in terms of raw materials or climate. How this place became the center of the largest empire the world has ever seen is something of a puzzle.
It is of course no coincidence that James Bond’s adventures started appearing in the 1950s, and maintained their appeal over the second half of the troubled twentieth century. This was the period of the dismantlement of the British Empire, and the diminishment of Britain as an international power. This was good news, by and large, for the various peoples finally getting their freedom and independence after many decades of rule by a foreign power. But for many Englishmen it was bad news. Britain had been defined by its imperial identity for more than a century. The truth (that we are a small country on the edge of Europe) has been a bitter pill for many of us to swallow.
Therefore a series of compensatory fantasies began emerging: An English spy has adventures all over the globe, saving the world on many occasions. The great powers owe debts of gratitude to an Englishman.
The danger with these sorts of compensatory fantasies, particularly if they are prolonged over many years, is that they can overwrite the perception of the real situation. Because the enormous British Empire is a thing of the past. We no longer own such vast tracts of land. The English ruling classes no longer even “own” most of Britain, since legislative and legal devolution has passed most of the relevant powers over to Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish regional assemblies. The roar of Empire for the period of Bond novels, and much more so for the period of Bond films, has been a long, low, melancholy, withdrawing growl.
So, actually, “killing people for a living” is no longer what Englishmen do. Compared with Chicago or Los Angeles, for instance, the murder rate in London is tiny. We no longer possess an empire in which to strut around ending people’s lives. Okay, I’ll concede this point; Bond’s assassin-chic does not reflect any present-day English reality. But there are still all those other things. . . .
Perhaps you have come across the French phrase for a particular sexual practice: la vice anglaise. The English vice. Which vice is that? Well, since you ask, it was a vice of which Ian Fleming himself was rather fond. If you want me to be more specific, I’ll have to refer you to a scene in the very first Bond novel, 1953’s Casino Royale. Captured by the bad guys, Bond is tied naked to a wicker chair. A hole has been cut into the seat of this chair. You can imagine, without me needing to spell it out in graphic detail (I’m English, remember: our thing is understatement rather than graphic detail)—you can imagine which part of Bond’s naked body pendulates through this hole. The bad-guys then thrash the pendant organs with a carpet beater. The word that occurs to me when I read this is: ouch.
Bond is being held against his will and tortured, of course, but if we imagine that he has actively sought out this experience then we have a pretty good working definition of la vice anglaise.
James Bond’s sexual adventures may provide erotic fantasy material for unprepossessing and inexperienced young males, but it doesn’t take a great deal of analysis to see this fictional promiscuity as a symptom of psychological malaise rather than a glorious celebration of sexuality. It takes an individual pretty repressed about sex (and for repression see number four below)—and indeed pretty tangled-up and revolted by the whole business—to take pleasure in being sexually punished to this extent.
The fact is that Bond hates women. He sleeps with women, yes, but he despises them. This is so thoroughly evident in Fleming’s books that it makes them, I think, rather icky reading nowadays. It’s true of a lesser extent of the films, especially more recently—thankfully our culture is no longer as tolerant of casual misogyny poorly disguised as “joking” as it used to be. But, in case this revision blurs our memory of the original character’s attitudes, let’s have a quick refresher course on one of the novels.
Let’s stay with the novel Casino Royale (written in 1953) for a moment, since that’s going to be the next film. In Fleming’s novel Bond sleeps with a fellow British agent called Vesper Lynd (she later turns out to be a Russian double agent, and kills herself). He’s unhappy that he has to work with a female agent in the first place (“women were for recreation,” he complains). The sex? We’re told that “the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape.” When he learns of her death, he says only, “[T]he bitch is dead.” Look again at those lines. You think this reflects an individual who likes women? (From For Your Eyes Only, 1960: “Don’t be a silly bitch, this is man’s work.” From The Spy Who Loved Me, 1962: “All women love semi-rape.” From You Only Live Twice, 1964: “This is man’s work.”)
How does this reflect on the English? Are Englishmen renowned the world over for their sexual promiscuity? Perhaps not. Do we all hate women? I hope not. I mean, I know I don’t. My wife would kill me if she thought that.
Ah, the English. So suave! So well-dressed! So handsome!
Let’s pull out of the air a list of certain famous Englishmen, excluding only the fictional ones (for their handsomeness, or otherwise, is entirely a matter of speculation). Behold, then, this list (and this is the last one, I promise) of gorgeously good-looking men:
• Winston Churchill
• Prince Charles
• Tony Blair
• Me
Now Churchill is handsome iff (which is to say “if and only if”) your definition of handsome is “must look as though a freakishly large baby has been squeezed into a suit slightly too small for him.” Corpulent, sulky, and with the look of something sculpted in the Jim Henson Creature Shop out of a half ton of part-melted wax: this was Churchill. He might have helped us win the Second World War, but handsome? No.
Prince Charles? A nose apparently stolen from the face of a much, much larger person, the bald patch of a Franciscan monk, the teeth of Donkey from Shrek. Handsome?
Tony Blair. This is an easy one to test. Approach any heterosexual woman of your acquaintance and ask her whether she finds Tony Blair to be an attractive man. Her reaction can be measured by exactly how much she shudders in revulsion. This will be between “a moderate trembly shudder” and a “wild juddery shudder that shakes loose her hair.”
And finally, me. Am I handsome? No, I am not handsome. I look, since you ask, like a cod with a hairdo. My mouth is like the TARDIS, bigger on the inside than the out, which means that my tongue and the inside of my lips are constantly trying to spill out into the real world. If my eyes were any wider apart they’d actually be floating an inch to the left and right of my skull. I’m not what you’d call a handsome man.
But this doesn’t bother me. We English really don’t do handsome. This is a country in which Elton John is a pop star. That’s pop star—the idol who cavorts on stage in tight trousers to arouse screaming hordes of young people. Elton John. This is a country in which our most alluring sportsman is David Beckham—not bad looking, I concede, but a voice that even Pee Wee Herman would ridicule as too squeaky.
This, of course, is why filmmakers cast Celts or Antipodeans as Bond. There’s nobody in the entire realm of England good looking enough really to pull the part off. So, in this respect, I’m not afraid to assert that the statement “James Bond is extremely handsome, and dresses extremely well” bears no relation to the reality of Englishness at all.
Now we’re really getting somewhere. Sangfroid, that’s an English trait. No wild gesticulating, no raised voices.
But let’s be precise here. “Keeping one’s cool” for an Englishman actually means “repressing one’s feelings.” This is the heart and soul of being English: emotional repression.
Repression is now a word that has, for most people, wholly negative connotations. People will spend serious money to have specialist psychoanalysts banish their unhealthy repression. Except in England. Victorian culture saw “manly self-repression” as a necessary part of masculinity: Mediterranean types might gesticulate, and might enjoy passionate love affairs; the English never raised their arms above their shoulders, and conducted love affairs with stiffness mainly confined to their upper lips.
There’s a part of me that delights in this, I’ll confess. Maybe other nations have a more vibrant and colorful life, but there is something rather wonderful in never letting yourself get away from yourself. Something civilized in continuing to smile and nod in the face of tedium, annoyance, or idiocy. Tolkien once claimed that he spoke “the specialised politeness dialect of the Old Western Man” . . . that glorious mode of speech where the rudeness of other parties is met with a murmured “charmed, I’m sure” rather than a petulant rudeness of one’s own. “I say, old chap, would you mind awfully not bashing me around the head with that cricket bat . . . ?”
It’s a wonderful thing. But it can’t really be called “keeping one’s cool.” To keep one’s cool one must have cool to begin with, and emotional repression is hardly cool. So if we are to insist upon James Bond as an individual who never loses his cool, we’re not talking about an Englishman anymore.
Ah, now we’re talking. At last! A nation of gadgets. Thirty million men and boys in garden sheds or cellar rooms putting the finishing touches to their model railway sets. Amateur inventors creating bizarre machines. Wallace, from the Wallace and Grommit movies. That’s English.
But wait a moment. Bond isn’t the one in his shed (or the high-tech MI6 equivalent of a shed) making the gadgets. He’s the person who coolly utilizes the gadgets, and then throws them wastefully away. The truly English person in this scenario is Q, not Bond.
In fact, Q trumps Bond on “trueborn Englishman” on almost every level. He’s physically unprepossessing. He has no cool. He (I’m guessing here, but nevertheless) does not have sex with a string of gorgeous international supermodels.
There’s only one conclusion to be drawn. If Bond is the quintessential Englishman, then Q is the true Bond.
How confusing is that?
The conclusion seems inescapable: Bond isn’t English.
There’s only one problem with this conclusion: of course Bond is English. He’s the most famous Englishman in the world.
So what’s going on?
Put it this way: Bond works not as gloss upon actual nationhood, but as a blatant piece of wish-fulfillment. Bond is not as we English are, but as we might wish to be. Of course that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Most nationalities, I think, can argue that they have things about which they are proud and traits or associations of which they are a little ashamed. An American, for instance, can salute his or her flag with genuine pride—government of the people by the people for the people is one of the noblest and most inspiring concepts in human history, and the nation that invented it and first put it into practice deserves to feel happy with itself. At the same time I daresay most Americans who put their mind to it feel pretty ashamed of bits of their national history—slavery, say, or the systematic eradication of a large proportion of the native American population. But for most Americans July 4th is a genuinely felt day of pride.
Nationality can be a strength; it can give a person a sense of belonging, an identity, a larger structure to their life. It can focus the positive aspects of pride, the urge to excel, even the impulse toward self-sacrifice. But we all know how bad it can go, when it goes bad. The rank fascist nationalisms of the twentieth century—the wars and genocides practiced in the name of nationhood made those hundred years the bloodiest in the entire stretch of human history. We know where we stand on that. Pride in one’s nation is one thing; racist nationalism is another.
My personal experience is European, and it seems to me that there are two nations in that ancient continent with particular problems articulating their nationhood. England is one. The other is Germany—a twenty-first-century nation of exemplary civilization and humanity that still, sixty years on, labors under the burden placed upon it by Hitler. But in one sense, judging by my various German friends, Germany knows where it stands. It was forged as a nation in the nineteenth century out of a long tradition of the highest and most noble culture: the very greatest European composers, philosophers, and poets were German (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heine, Goethe, Schiller). Although a hectic flush of Prussian militarism was present at the very birth of the nation, its roots were deeper, more civilized. For Germans today the Hitler period stands as a huge object lesson in how not to be nationalistic, a terrible and wrongheaded false step on the path of national development. Modern-day Germany has better things to which it can appeal when it talks about its self-identity—and when a modern-day German declares pride in their nation theirs can be a purer and better self-belief.
We English have not had this salutary lesson. The fact that we’re still indulging in this adolescent compensatory fantasy of nationhood speaks eloquently to the English process of refusing to acknowledge the hard lesson of our own history. Bond is a rather accurate icon of this: he is all about the hidden unsavory elements behind an apparently attractive exterior. (Sexy? Scratch him and reveal his misogyny. Cool? Repressed, more like.)
But there may be a way of reclaiming him. Let’s agree to take Bond as a twenty-first-century European—as cool as a Frenchman, as sexy as an Italian, as expert with machines as a German . . . and as escapist and unreal a fantasy as an Englishman ever dreamed.
ADAM ROBERTS is a writer and a University of London professor, and he’s English. He lives in England with his English wife and English child, just to the west of London. Actually, his mother’s Welsh, but he certainly sounds English when you talk to him. Like 007 Bond, he is licensed. In his case he’s licensed not so much to kill as to drive any motorized vehicle Category B (cars, including cars with a trailer weighing up to 750kgs). But it’s still a license.
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1 I know, I know. But look at the facts. Okay, he was born near the Potomac River, but both his parents were English (descended lineally from Edward III and William the Conqueror, in fact). Born in English territories of English parents makes you English, I’d say. Washington’s youthful ambition was to achieve a commission in the British army, a dream he worked toward assiduously. He was a dedicated fan of the game of cricket, a game which separates out the civilized, English and Commonwealth on the one hand from the uncivilized and American on the other. Of course it’s true that he ended up defeating the English in the War of Independence, kicking us out of North America, and governing as the first U.S. president—but, hey, nobody’s perfect.
2 And to those of you who think that because Prince Charles is Prince of Wales that doesn’t make him not English I would just like to say: I know it. It’s just funnier this way.
3 I mean real football. I mean that game where the players maneuver a ball with their feet. Not American Football or, as I like to think of it, American Foot-Hand-And-In-Fact-Whole-Bodyball.