 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Eric (Robert) Linklater (1899-1974) |
|
Scottish historical writer, and versatile novelist, who began his career as a poet. Eric Linklater gained world fame with his cosmopolitan picarescues Juan in America (1931), set in the days of prohibition, and Private Angelo (1946), a comic account of survival in Italy during WWII. Many of Linklater's books were based on his travels in different parts of the world. Some little time ago, when I was celebrating my seventieth birthday, an alert and ingenious young man called Raeburn Mackie, employed by the Scotsman, came to talk to me, and wrote a very friendly article which filled half a page. At some time during our conversation he must have asked me how I would describe myself, and I, as it seems, presented him with a phrase that he found good enough for a title. His article appeared under the banner, in thick black capital letters: According to some sources, Eric Linklater was born in Dournby, Orkney Islands, but it was not until in his third volume of autobiography, Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970), when he corrected the birth place: it is Penarth, Wales. However, Linklater regarded the islands as his spiritual home, and at the age of ten he had calculated beyond doubt that he had been conceived in Orkney. His father, Robert Linklater, was a master mariner. Elizabeth Young, who was of Swedish and English origin, was Robert's second wife – "she was a woman of fierce and determined character who had arbitrarily decided that she was Scotch; and Scotch she remained when she went to live in South Wales," Linklater later said. (Fanfare for a Tin Hat: A Third Essay in Autobiography by Eric Linklater, Macmillan, 1970, p. 27) The family moved back to Orkney when Linklater was very young. "My knowledge of Orkney – the love of Orkney which dominated and perhaps distorted so much of my life – I owe, not to my Orkney-born father, but to my neurotic, frequently exasperating, and ultimately decisive mother." (Ibid., p. 39) The original form of Linklater's surname can be translated as "at the stone in the heather." Linklater attended the Cardiff Intermediate School for boys and Aberdeen Grammar School; its most famous pupil was Byron, whose statue is in front of the school. Linklater's first printed poem was an imitation of Lord Byron's Don Juan. In 1916 he entered the Aberdeen University to read medicine. During World War I Linklater served as a private in the Black Watch Regiment on the Somme front. He shared the romantic patriotism that Rupert Brooke expressed in his poems, and has later told that when he was a few weeks as a sniper, it gave to his life an intensity which he has never known since. Near the ruined village of Voormezeele Linklater was wounded in the head, and he spent several month is the hospital. In 1919 Linklater returned to civil life and continued his studies of medicine and English at Aberdeen. Linklater realized soon that he had chosen the wrong profession, and started to read at King's College English Literature, receiving his M.A. in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 he worked as an assistant editor of The Times of India in Bombay. Linklater worked had, lived, on the whole, "an abstemious life", and eventually felt himself imprisoned there. He also wanted to writer something larger than articles. He returned back to Scotland after making a journey that took him through Persia and across the Caspian Sea to the Caucasus. Among Linklater's early works is the novel White Maa's Saga (1929), an autobiographical story about a young Orcadian who attends medical school in Aberdeen (Inverdoon). The novel has an Orcadian title – it means "Seagull's Saga". The play The Devil's in the News (1929) concerns a séance whose participants are possessed by Cromwell, Napoleon, and characters from the cast of John Gay's The Beggar Opera. While in the U.S. he published Poet's Pub (1930), the first in series of his popular satirical novels. In 1928 Linklater worked as an assistant at the University of Aberdeen and then spent two years in the United States and China on a Commonwealth Fellowship. At Berkley as at the University of Cornell Linklater did not attend lectures, but spent his time with his second novel, determined to be a novelist. Juan in America was a success and was chosen by the Book
Society as Book of the Month. Harold Nicolson wrote in his review: "Mr
Eric Linklater is a writer of great intelligence and exuberant fantasy
. . . Juan in America
is a supremely amusing book. But it is more than that. It is a serious
and sympathetic criticism of American conditions. It is a work of
outstanding literary skill." (Eric Linklater: A Critical Biography by Michael Parnell, J. Murray, 1984, p. 99) The work annoyed the
Commonwealth Foundation – Linklater was accused of showing too little
respect for the United States and its institutions. However, it remained in print for more than thirty years. Jonathan Cape, his
publisher wanted him to write a series of books, "Juan in Italy", "Juan
in Spain", and "Juan in Germany". Linklater was not first thrilled, but
later the "innocent bystander", Juan Motley, continued his travels in Juan in China (1937).
Juan follows – from a Californian nudist colony – the beautiful and
patriotic Kuo Kuo to China. She wants to rescue her country. Why the devil should Japan go in to ruin their peace? Japan, he was sure, had never produced anything as lovely as Kuo Kuo, with her ivory skin, her narrow green dress, and the gold buttons on its collar. He was more than half-ready to fight for China himself.' (from Juan in China by Eric Linklater, Jonathan Cape, 1937, p. 23) Linklater stood unsuccessfully in 1933 as a parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Nationalist Party in the East Fife by-election. Linklater polled less than 4 per cent of the vote and became disappointed in the whole party. These experiences provided
material for his 1934 novel Magnus Merriman, a roman à clef,
in which Linklater described a
fictitious by-election. One of the characters, named Beaty Bracken who
flushes a Union Jack down a toilet, was based on the national activist
Wendy Wood; she sued Linklater for libel, eventually the case was
settled out of court. The poet Hugh MacDiarmir, a founder member of the
National Party, who was thrown out of it for his communism, appeared as
Hugh Skene,
"Scotland's foremost poet": ". . . he was a pretentious versifier who
concealed his lack of talent by a ponderous ornamentation of words so
archaic that nobody knew their meaning. . . ." (Ibid., introduced by Douglas Gifford, Canongate Classics, 1990, p. 35) In The Lion and the Unicorn (1935),
about Scotland's historical relations with England, Linklater argued
that after the English translation of the Bible was accepted, "[t]the
Scottish tongue no longer spoke a national language . . . the language
of Burns was an artefact, a literary convention." (Ibid., p. 113)
At the end he concludes that although Scotland's incorporation in Great
Britain has been a great material benefit to Scotsmen, history seems to
on the side of the Nationalists. "Our little renaissaace . . . may be
the prelude to a new era." (/Ibid., p. 192) The Men of Ness (1932) – "Out of the misty northlands, the Viking hordes swooped to ravage, burn, and slaughter" – was translated into German. When it was discovered that Linklater was an outspoken critic of the Nazi regime, the novel was publicly burnt. The Impregnable Women (1938), set in near-future, was a rewrite of Aristophanes' Lysistrata, an anti-war comedy. In the story (there is even a character names Lady Lysistrata) women band together to end the war in Europe – it breaks out when a fleet of French aeroplanes drop bombs on London. After marrying Marjorie MacIntyre, who shared Linklater's affection
for the Orkneys, he returned with her to the remote island community of
his childhood. Marjorie sang at concerts organized by the Women's Rural
Institute, and played cello in the Kirkwall Orchestra. With
Marjorie he had two sons and two daughters. Reluctant to settle down, Linklater boarded in 1935 a ship bound for
India. From China he sailed to Japan, crossed the Pacific and the
United States, and returned to Scotland. Linklater took the side of the Republicans in the Spanish
Civil War: "I am against Fascism and Franco and all who set the
mythical value of an imaginary totality above the intellect and freedom
of the individual. To European civilization Fascism is a dreary and
dreadful a peril as another Flood - and the ark of the Covenant has
unhappily been scuttled." (Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Left Review, 1937) During World War II Linklater
commanded a fortress in the Orkneys and later worked at the public
relations section of the British War Office. The Orkney Blast,
which he launched in 1941, was aimed at all those serving in Orkney.
The last issue, which came out on 24 November 1944, declared "Six
Allied Armies Battering Gates of Reich" in a front-page headline. While
writing the official history of the Eighth Army campaign, Linklater
participated in 1944, by chance, in rescuing invaluable works of art.
With Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a BBC war correspondent, he stumbled upon
a treasure of masterpieces from
Florence's Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace, hidden from the Nazis at
the Castello di Montegufoniin Tuscany. Among the paintings were Paolo Uccello's The Battle of San Romano and Botticelli's Primavera. The castle was the property of Sir Osbert Sitwell, who had purchased it in 1909. The Campaign in Italy
(1951) is considered one of best overviews of the peninsular war.
Moreover, Linklater's experiences in Italy gave basis for his novel Private Angelo (1946), published by Jonathan Cape. It has been compared to Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Schweik. Regarding the style, it is a sort of a precursor of Catch-22. Angelo is an Italian soldier who fears and hates war. Lucrezia, his
sweetheart, bears a child to an Englishman, while he was in Africa. At
one point of the story Angelo makes fun of the "liberation" of Italy
with musical terms: "In the first place, before a town or village can
be liberated
it must be occupied by the Germans, and the Germans will rob it of
everything they can find; but that is of no importance, that is merely
the Overture. Liberation really begins when the Allied Air Forces bomb
the town: that is the First Movement, Allegro
so to speak. The
Second Movement is often quite leisurely but full of caprice: it occurs
when the Allied Artillery opens fire to knock down what the bombers
have missed, and may be called Andante Capriccioso. After that has gone on for some time the liberating infantry will rush in, that is the Third Movement, the Scherzo . . . " In the Finale officials
of the Allied Military Government say: "If you want to live here you
must apply for your permission, and it is against the law for you to be
domiciled anywhere else." (Ibid., pp. 179-180) A few years after the publication of the novel, it was made into a film, starring Peter Ustinov,
who co-wrote and co-directed it with Michael Anderson. This war comedy
presented its pacifist stand right after the credentials: "To all conscripted
soldiers, past and present, the world over: to all those who never
really knew what they were doing: to the baffled, the cowardly, the
peace-loving: to the vast majority of us, thios picture is
affectionally dedicated." For the most part the screen version followed
the spirit of the novel rather closely, but it told the story
retrospectively,
from the point of view of Angelo's British friend, instead of having an
omniscient narrator of the original text. "The film leaves the audience
on a note of a cosy European togetherness, claiming that in the past,
'when the world was in despair', the Italians saved it with their
painting and poetry . . ." (Beauty and the Beast: Italianness in British Cinema by Elisabetta Girelli, 2009, p. 86) In 1947 Linklater moved into Pitcalzean House in the county of Ross
and Cromarty. From 1945 to 1948 he was Rector of Aberdeen
University. An account of his travels in Korea, Australia and New Zealand, A Year in Space, came out in 1953. Linklater's other works include juvenile tales, a non-fiction book about the Icelandic Sagas, The Ultimate Viking (1955), philosophical dialogues written for the BBC, including The Great Ship and Rabelais Replies, and a radio play. For The Wind on the Moon (1944), about the adventures of two sisters and humans who transform magically into animal form, Linklater won a Carnegie Medal. Composed in wartime, the light-hearted story dealt also with such serious questions as death and fight for liberty. "There is a great deal of night in the book, but it is a protecting, welcoming, transforming darkness, where the bold are rewarded." ('Classic of the month: The Wind on the Moon' by Eric Linklater by James Meek, The Guardian, 23 February, 2005) Carolyn Daniel has noted that Linklater is "extraordinarily concerned with food, but during a period of post-war government-enforced food rationing "the food items he describes would have generally been unavailable even to the most privileged adult or child. (Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children's Literature by Carolyn Daniel, 2006, pp. 192-193) Nicolas Bentley, who drew the pictures, also illustrated T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Much of Linklater's fiction in the late 1940s was fantasy, including The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea (1949), written for childen, and A Spell for Old Bones (1949), set in Scotland before the Romans. The central character, Furbister, is a giant. His parents are human. "It was the good fortune of Scotland that there were rarely more than three or four giants alive in any one generation; and even though, from time to time, a giant and giantess met, they never bred children of their own size, and ideed rarely bred at all." (p. 9) Furbister quarrels with his neighbour, Od McGammon, King of Carrick, born in the same year as Furbister. On one level, the story can be read as a political allegory. A Terrible Freedom (1966) tells of a man who finds the characters of his dream world taking over the real one. Linklater died in Aberdeen on November 7, 1974. He is buried in Orkney. Andro Linklater, his son, became also a writer. For further reading: The Scottish Novel by Francis Russell Hart (1978); The Macmillan Companion to Scottish Literature by Trevor Royle (1983); Eric Linklater: A Critical Biography by Michael Parnell (1984); Studies on Scottish Fiction: Twentieth Century, eds. by Horst W. Drescher and Joachim Schwend (1990); 'Linklater, Eric', in World Authors 1900-1950, Vol. 3, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Scotland's Books: A History of Scottish Literature by Robert Crawford (2009); Scottish Novels of the Second World War by Isobel Murray (2011); 'Scotland and Beyond: Eric Linklater's Cosmopolitan Imagination' by Bernard Sellin, in Scottish Literary Review, Volume 9, Number 2 (Autumn/Winter 2017) Selected works
|
