More Scots should know about the work of Eric Linklater

This was a curious episode in Linklater’s life. The success of Juan in America meant he had become a full-time writer, and he saw himself as part of the Scottish Renaissance, an intellectual grouping determined to revive Scottish culture whose most famous figure was the poet Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve).

Linklater joined MacDiarmid (below) in the National Party of Scotland which had been founded in 1928 and which had contested seats in two General Elections and several by-elections, but in no contest had it scored more than 10,000 votes. After publishing Men Of Ness – a tale of Viking Orkney in the form of a Norse saga – in 1932, on February 2, 1933, Linklater stood for the NPS in the East Fife by-election caused by the death of National Liberal MP Sir James Duncan Miller.

The trouble for Linklater was that the NPS had few local members and virtually no campaigners and he duly lost heavily – he finished last of the five candidates polling just 1083 votes, just 3.6% of those who voted. The experience obviously disillusioned Linklater who promptly wrote the satirical novel Magnus Merriman, my personal favourite of his books.

Here’s how Professor Alan Riach described the novel in his essay about Linklater in The National in 2017: “Magnus Merriman (1934) is a comic tour de force, again beginning in fictionalised autobiography with Magnus in the trenches of the First World War … Magnus returns to Scotland for the rising tide of political and literary national reawakening of the 1920s.

“There is a hilarious portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid as the poet ‘Hugh Skene’ (which MacDiarmid relished!) but at the heart of the book there is Magnus’s wavering commitment to the idealistic vision of a revitalised Scotland and his more hedonistic indulgences in the pleasures of flesh and high adventure. As the novel progresses, these oscillate convincingly. Rich comedy is sustained through touching pathos and sympathy.

“The ending is a perfectly judged balance: rhapsodic wish-fulfilment gives way to realism that presents its own consolations and forward-pointing (arguably, perhaps, feminist) strengths.”

READ MORE: The start of a long, illustrious career of Eric Linklater

Some people didn’t get the jokes. One of its female characters, Beaty Bracken, is a thinly disguised version of that fervent nationalist and founding member of the NPS, Wendy Wood, who ended up suing Linklater after he wrote that she had flushed the Union Flag down the toilet – she denied ever doing so and eventually won a farthing in damages in an out-of-court settlement.

The NPS later merged with the Scottish Party to form the Scottish National Party and one can only wonder what might have happened if Linklater had stayed prominent in the nationalist movement and given it the intellectual leadership and campaigning literature it clearly lacked for many years.

That year of 1933 was politically disappointing but personally positive for Linklater as he got married on June 1 to Marjorie MacIntyre, the daughter of Scotland rugby internationalist and later a Unionist MP Ian MacIntyre.

Marjorie had trained as an actress and she became a renowned campaigning figure in the arts in her own right, a member of the Scottish Arts Council who helped to found Orkney’s St Magnus Festival and was also a leading SNP member, acting as electoral agent for Winnie Ewing. She died in June 1997, at the age of 88.

Eric and Marjorie had four children, in chronological order of birth daughters Alison and Kristin and sons Magnus and Andro. Now 90, Alison is an artist who lives in Orkney. Kristin became a renowned vocal coach and professor in the theatrical arts before her death in 2020 at the age of 84 – her son is the American actor Hamish Linklater.

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Magnus is a journalist who is best known for his editorship of The Scotsman and his chairmanship of the Scottish Arts Council – his wife Veronica was a Liberal peer, Baroness Linklater of Butterstone who died in 2022 aged 79. Andro was a distinguished journalist, writer and historian who died in Edinburgh in 2013, aged 68.

Family life was hugely important to Linklater, and he took to writing incessantly to sustain them. He became a prolific novelist following up his first big success with Juan in China (1937), which Riach says “includes its hero’s lovemaking with beautiful Siamese twins and a military attack with tanks made of cardboard. The shock and satire remain challenging, forceful and sometimes outrageous”.

During the Second World War, Linklater took command of a contingent of Royal Engineers in Orkney before being recruited as a major in the press directorate of the War Office which included a stint in Italy where he participated in the discovery of Italian art treasures that had been hidden from the Nazis.

That experience in Italy provided the material for Private Angelo (1946), in which the title character is a good Italian man caught up in war. As I wrote a fortnight ago, Riach considers it to be “one of the finest novels to emerge from the Second World War.”

It was made into a film by Peter Ustinov while Linklater’s 1951 novel Laxdale Hall was also filmed.

During the war, Linklater published a children’s novel The Wind On The Moon, which won the Carnegie Medal. He was awarded the CBE in 1954 having already served a stint as rector of Aberdeen University. He continued writing into his seventies, his 1959 novel The Merry Muse being particularly memorable for its satirical view of Edinburgh. His last novel was A Terrible Freedom (1966) with his last volume of memoirs A Fanfare For A Tin Hat published in 1970, in which he finally admitted he had been born in Wales.

Eric Linklater died on November 7, 1974, in Aberdeen and was buried in the kirkyard near Harray Loch in Orkney, where his wife Veronica also lies. Some 50 years on from his death, Linklater is often forgotten and I have no hesitation in saying there should be a re-examination of his work and legacy with a view to informing more Scots about this great writer.