IN this second of a three-part series on the life and career of Eric Linklater – the 50th anniversary of whose death took place on Thursday – this week I will be concentrating on his writing but next week I will be speculating as to what might have happened to him and the cause of Scottish nationalism if he had just been a tad more successful in standing as a candidate for the National Party of Scotland, forerunner of the SNP.

I have to say I am disappointed that more was not made of the anniversary of the passing of Linklater, whom I consider to be one of Scotland’s finest writers who was also a poet and historian as well as a successful novelist. His reputation in literary circles can be demonstrated by the fact that the 1985 re-publication of the first 10 Penguin books to mark the 50th anniversary of the paperbacks saw Linklater’s comedic novel Poet’s Pub – later made into a film starring James Robertson Justice and Rona Anderson, the wife of Gordon Jackson – feature in that original Penguin 10, which also included works by Sir Compton Mackenzie, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, and that shows how highly he was once rated.

As always, I leave critiques of creative work to others who are much better qualified such as Professor Alan Riach, whose piece about Linklater for this very paper in 2017 was quite excellent. I will be quoting from it today and next week when I will be urging for a re-examination of Linklater and his career and legacy as I really do think we Scots should know a lot more about him.

For instance, I wrote last week about how he was also a soldier who had a brush with death, surviving being shot in the head in World War I. One reader thanked me for that information which he never knew about Linklater.

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As I wrote in the first part, we do know a lot about Linklater’s life, mainly because he wrote three volumes of memoirs – namely The Man On My Back (1941), A Year Of Space (1953), and Fanfare For A Tin Hat (1970). Plenty more biographical details are out there, while Linklater’s own correspondence with the likes of Naomi Mitchison, William Roughead and Mackenzie are preserved in the archives of the National Library of Scotland.

I left off last week when he had returned to Aberdeen University and gave up medicine for English literature in which he graduated with an MA in 1925. Determined to become a writer, in 1922, Linklater as an undergraduate penned the first-ever scripted Students Show for the university, a humorous musical he titled Stella The Bajanella. It was not his first output – he had earlier written a long poem inspired by Byron’s Don Juan. There was a statue of Byron standing outside Aberdeen Grammar School and Linklater always emphasised how the poet had influenced him.

Like many writers he started his career in journalism, moving to Bombay – now Mumbai – in 1925 where he started as a reporter with the Time of India but rapidly rose through the ranks – mainly due to staff succumbing to illness – to gain the post of assistant editor. Though a diligent reporter and editor, he lasted less than two years in the job, feeling imprisoned – he wrote he had to endure an “abstemious life” and couldn’t write the fiction he felt called to.

Returning to Aberdeen University via the Caucasus and Caspian Sea, he started work as an assistant in the English department. Linklater then won a Commonwealth fellowship to study in the USA and from 1928 to 1930, he studied at Cornell and Berkeley, two of America’s most prestigious universities.

While in the USA in 1929, he published his first novel, White-Maa’s Saga, based on his own life and the family links to Orkney – it features an Orcadian medical student studying in Inverdoon, a thinly disguised Aberdeen.

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That year also saw the publication of Poet’s Pub, and it was this comic novel that drew him to the attention of literary circles. Written mostly when he was avoiding lectures, the book is about an aspiring poet whose mother appoints him to run an Oxford pub which she has acquired. Imaginative and genuinely funny, it is full of memorable characters.

Linklater had announced himself as a fresh voice in literature and confirmed the promise of his first two novels with his third, Juan In America, published in 1931. Professor Riach touts it as “his greatest popular success” that “breathlessly follows the adventures of a descendant of Byron’s Don Juan in the United States, with vivid, fresh encounters with new cities, independent women, radically un-British attitudes, prohibition, gangsters and rising new world optimism”.

Set against the background of prohibition and looming economic depression, it contains some of Linklater’s most memorable lines: “There won’t be any revolution in America ... the people are too clean. They spend all their time changing their shirts and washing themselves. You can’t feel fierce and revolutionary in a bathroom.”

Another paragraph reads: “I’ve been married six months. She looks like a million dollars, but she only knows 120 words and she’s only got two ideas in her head. The other one’s hats.”

Satirical and daring, Juan In America was an immediate success and was chosen by the Book Society as Book of the Month.

The diarist, critic, writer and later politician 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.”

That and other very positive reviews – and the fact that it sold so well – convinced Eric Linklater that he could and should make a living as a full-time writer and so he began his long and successful career.

Find out next week just what Linklater did, and it was not all about writing, as he returned to uniform in the Second World War.