Not in Reilly.

Linklater, Eric Robert Russell (1899–1974), writer, was born on 8 March 1899 at Penarth, Glamorgan, the only son and elder child of Robert Baikie Linklater (d. 1916), master mariner, of Dounby, Orkney, and his wife, (Mary) Elizabeth (c.1867–1957), daughter of James Young, master mariner. Though herself no Scot, Elizabeth Linklater was passionately Scottish and Orcadian in her loyalties. She insisted on maintaining a holiday house in Orkney, where the Linklaters had lived for many generations, and once it became possible she transferred the family home from Cardiff to Aberdeen. Eric Linklater, who would also see himself as both Scottish and Orcadian, attended Aberdeen grammar school from 1913 to 1916.

In 1914 Linklater enlisted in a territorial battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, but when war broke out he was rejected for service because of his poor eyesight. In 1917, however, by which time his father had died in Ceylon after an engagement with a German U-boat, he contrived to get himself accepted by the army and then posted to France. He served with the Black Watch in late 1917 and early 1918, until wounded in the course of the German spring offensive. Ironically, given the basis of his previous rejection, he became a sniper. In spite of grudgingly admitting to terror of the mud, the bullying, and the sudden slaughter of the western front, he was exalted. The war was for him a deep and intense emotional experience, as he recorded in Fanfare for a Tin Hat (1970):

My few weeks as a sniper gave my life an excitement, an intensity which I have never known since. I have, on the whole, had a happy life, and I have known much pleasure. But in my nineteenth year I lived at a high pitch of purpose, a continuous physical and mental alertness, that has never again suffused my brain and body. (Linklater, Fanfare, 67)

His head wound was near fatal; he was saved only by the legendary tin hat. From 1918 to 1925 Linklater was a student at Aberdeen University, first, unsuccessfully, in medicine, a course of study which he had begun in 1916 and which provided material for his first novel, White Maa's Saga (1929). This was only the first example of his use of his own life experience as material for fiction. He subsequently studied English, and graduated MA in 1925, with first-class honours, being awarded the Seafield medal, the Minto memorial prize, and the Senatus prize in English. The unforgotten intensity of the eighteen-year-old, however, would leave the mature writer liable to search for novelty, change, and action, and ensured that travel would be a central feature of Linklater's life and writing. He spent the years 1925 to 1927 in Bombay, as an assistant editor of the Times of India. There followed a year in Aberdeen (1927–8) as assistant to the professor of English, and two years (1928–30) in the USA as a Commonwealth fellow, based first at Cornell and then at Berkeley.

Linklater's literary career proper began in 1929, and his output was both varied and prolific. He published twenty-three novels, three volumes of short stories, two children's books, two books of verse, ten plays (including several ‘conversations’ for radio during the Second World War), three fine autobiographies, and another twenty-three books of miscellaneous essays and histories. His greatest popularity was in the earlier part of his career. His reputation was effectively established by his third novel, Juan in America (1931), a richly comic, picaresque extravaganza rather in the manner of Byron's Don Juan, but based on his observation of the United States, then in the grip of the extreme absurdities of prohibition and the resultant gangsterism...

Linklater's experiences in the First World War had made him particularly sensitive to the paradox of the horrors of war on the one hand, and its broadening of experience on the other. He repeatedly illustrated this paradox in his writing, and also continually expressed his unfailing admiration and love for the soldiers who carried on the war. He wrote a great deal about combat, in military histories and pamphlets as well as fiction. Between the wars he saw communism as just as dangerous as fascism, and was emotionally disabled by the Spanish Civil War, finding it impossible to support either side wholeheartedly.

From 1939 to 1941 Linklater commanded the Orkney fortress company, Royal Engineers. He was then posted to the directorate of public relations in the War Office, where he wrote pamphlets on several aspects of the army at war; he also produced at this time, in his personal capacity, a number of conversation pieces on war aims. From 1944 to 1945 Linklater served in Italy, and it was there that he had the experiences central to his most successful war novel, Private Angelo (1946), a work dedicated to the Eighth Army. Linklater described his love affair with Italy as ‘a state of idealistic adultery’. ‘[T]he subject of my novel was not only war and its capacity for destruction, but Italy and its genius for survival’ (Linklater, Fanfare, 316). The work's protagonist, Angelo, has led a rout of Italians fleeing from battle, and is dismissed in the first sentence as lacking the gift of courage. But the novel goes on to re-examine the idea of courage, and to stress the importance of understanding. By the end Angelo has served in three armies (Italian, German, and British) and has become the father of children, three of them illegitimate, one English, one Polish, and one Moroccan. The tenor of the book is against nationalism, and Linklater prefigures Heller and Waugh, and even Henry Kissinger, when he has the innocent Angelo say: ‘I hope you will not liberate us out of existence’. As armies bomb their own troops, and Angelo repeatedly deserts, the reader is shown the essential folly of war. But the wandering refugees, and the rapes of both Angelo and his fiancée, keep the serious horror in the forefront, and serve to maintain Linklater's conviction that, despite everything, this is a just and necessary war.

In 1945 Linklater was elected rector of Aberdeen University, which awarded him an honorary degree in 1946. In 1947 the Linklaters left Orkney, where conditions had changed greatly during the war, for Pitcalzean House in Ross-shire. Here they lived until 1972 when, faced with oil-related developments in the locality, they moved to Aberdeenshire. In 1951 he published a semi-official history, The Campaign in Italy, and visited Korea with the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1954 he was appointed CBE; from 1968 to 1973 he was deputy lieutenant of Ross and Cromarty; and in 1971 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh...

Andrew Rutherford, rev. Isobel Murray, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography