Scottish Authors > Eric Linklater Novelist 1899-1974

Although Eric Linklater was born in Penarth, Wales, in 1899, he spent much of his childhood in Orkney and considered himself an Orcadian. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, but his medical studies at the University of Aberdeen were interrupted by nightmarish service as a sniper with the Black Watch in World War 1. After the War, he graduated in English Literature and took up journalism, becoming Assistant Editor of The Times of India 1925-27. There followed two years in the USA as a Commonwealth Fellow, from which emerged the work which established his reputation as a humorist, the novel Juan in America (1931), which satirised Prohibition America with immense vigour.

In all, Linklater was to write twenty three novels, ranging from the Viking saga of The Men of Ness (1932) to the Cold War fable A Spell for old bones (1949), from the dramatic retellings of Biblical stories Judas (1939) and Husband of Delilah (1962) to the anti-war comedy Private Angelo (1946). The novels all possess an amazing command of language, but if there is among this diversity a common theme, it is that all feature a central character in search of contentment.

In 1933, he married Marjorie Macintyre, and then stood as a candidate for the National Party of Scotland in a by-election, thinly disguising the unsuccessful campaign in the farcical Magnus Merriman (1934), notable for its merciless guying of stalwarts of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, in particular MacDiarmid.

During World War 11, he commanded Fortress Orkney as a Major in the Royal Engineers, then worked for the War Office recording the Italian Campaign, rediscovering the hidden art treasures of Florence - he kissed Botticelli's Primavera. His humane gentle story about Private Angelo, the Italian peasant who finally finds courage, is one of the finest novels of the War.

Throughout the fifties and sixties Linklater continued to add to his impressive range, following the moving prose-poem Roll of honour (1961) with the knockabout exposure of charlatanism A Man over forty (1963) and the experimental Pythonesque fantasy A Terrible freedom (1966). Simultaneously he found time to write plays for radio and (less successfully) for stage; some thirty short stories which for range and depth rival those of any Scottish author, collected as The Stories of Eric Linklater (1968); and many works of travel, history, biography, criminology, military history and children's fiction. There are three volumes of autobiography, The Man on my back (1941), A Year of space (1953), and Fanfare for a tin hat (1970), which must be supplemented by Michael Parnell's fine critical biography Eric Linklater (1984). Parnell apart, only Francis Russell Hart in The Scottish novel has written at any length on Linklater's work, a reminder of the deplorable narrowness of Scottish (and British) literary criticism.

Eric Linklater died on 7th November 1974 and is buried in Harray Kirkyard, Orkney.

John MacRitchie

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