People of the 20th Century
ERIC LINKLATER

Eric Robert Linklater as born in Glamorgan, South Wales, on March 8, 1899. His father, Robert Linklater, was a master mariner whose family came from Mossetter, Harray, while his mother. Elizabeth Young, was the daughter of a Swedish sea captain.

In 1917 he joined the Black Watch, rising in the ranks to corporal by the end of the year when he was posted to the front line where he served as marksman. He saw action at Passchendale and the Somme but at Ypres he was badly wounded by a German bullet that passed through his helmet and blew away part of his skull in a near fatal injury. He would always bear the scar in the back of his head.

Eric Linklater had been studying medicine at Aberdeen University before the war but at the conclusion of hostilities, he transferred to Kings College, Aberdeen, to study English Literature.

After graduating from university he worked in the offices of the Press & Journal before taking a post as assistant editor of The Times of India in 1925. He then spent a few years travelling before returning to Aberdeen University to take up a teaching post.

He finished his first novel in 1928, White Maa’s Saga, a semi-autobiographical story about an Orcadian medical student at the fictional Inverdoon University.

He later went to the USA and studied at Cornell, before transferring to Berkeley in California, and when he returned to Britain in 1930, his second novel Poet’s Pub had been published and he was working on another. Juan in America was based on his experiences there, and proved to be a great success. Published in 1931, it was reprinted nine times by the end of the year. It made the name Eric Linklater famous.

Eric Linklater died on November 7, 1974. His funeral was held at St Olaf’s Episcopal Church, Kirkwall, and he was buried at St Michael’s churchyard, Harray.

He could have had no better epitaph than the tribute that George Mackay Brown paid to him in The Orcadian of February 11, 1954:

“Eric Linklater is not primarily a novelist, or an essayist or a dramatist. He is above all else an enchanting prose poet. These fragments of wonderful singing prose are scattered all over his books, and through them English literature is permanently enriched.”