A Man’s Man

At Culloden, in the tourist shop, I picked a book from the bottom shelf. I was in Scotland on holiday with my Canadian husband, who, at the time, was dejected to discover that his MacDonald forbears had failed to be glorious in defeat.

The book was The Dark of Summer. I was not surprised that I hadn’t heard of its author, Eric Linklater, because there are vast holes in my education. However, I did expect that better-read friends would know the novel well. I was wrong. ‘What’s it about?’ they asked. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it starts off very calm and contented, then it gets all stormy and icy and drunken in the middle, but everything is resolved in the end.’ This is how I remember a book – as a sort of emotional score. At first I enjoyed being the only person ever to have read The Dark of Summer. It was like coming across a deserted beach that can only be reached by boat. But then, glancing down Linklater’s exhausting bibliography (twenty-three novels, ten plays, three children’s books, six collections of short stories, three biographies and more), the thought began to niggle at me: what had happened to all those books? I instigated a search. ‘Eric Linklater?’ said one second-hand bookshop owner as he went downstairs to rummage about in his basement. ‘I should be ashamed if I didn’t have anything by him. He’s rather out of fashion these days, isn’t he?’ Another said, ‘Eric Linklater? Must have, somewhere . . . sort of middlebrow?’ ‘Not at all!’ I exclaimed. I consulted my father, who has read everything. Or, at least, everything written before 1950. ‘Eric Linklater?’ he said. ‘You know Eric Linklater! He wrote The Wind on the Moon.’ It was true. He did. And my father had read it to me as a child. Linklater himself was conscious of a certain critical neglect: ‘Long ago I realized that my dreadful mistake was threefold: to write comedies; to write with evident enjoyment of what I was writing; and to live so far from London that I have never been able to buy, for critics, the strong drink they need.’ By ‘so far from London’ he meant Orkney, which is why I’d bought the novel in the first place. We were on our way to the Outer Hebrides, to Lewis, where, in 1852, my husband’s ancestor, Donald MacDonald, farmer of a few straggly sheep worth less than his outstanding rent, was offered ten acres of Canada in lieu of his debts. I imagined that Orkney, being an island off the coast of Scotland, must be very like Lewis, about which I had some very romantic ideas. These were only reinforced as I read:

. . . there is, at the top of summer, no darkness at midnight. The day puts on a veil, the light is screened, and a landscape that, in fine weather, appears at noon to be almost infinite – in which long roads and little houses are luminously drawn – becomes small and circumscribed, and the hills and the shore, the sheep in the fields and the glinting sea, are visible, as it were, through a pane of slightly obscuring glass. The landscape becomes an image of the world in which we live. It is not dark, but nothing can be seen as plainly and decisively as the light of noon pretends – noon flatters and deludes us – yet all that can be seen is solid, solid enough for faith, and if one’s heart is whole one can enjoy the beauty inherent in our mystery – a beauty that is, paradoxically, more visible in half-light.

This was perfect. This was what Lewis was going to be like: half-revealed mysteries poking out from behind every mist-clad standing stone. The Dark of Summer is ‘not a tale of war. It is only the story of a man who, fearing and detesting war, has seen something of it, and survived its perils as, so far, he has survived the more familiar pains of what is called peace.’ Tony Chisholm, a professional soldier caught up in ‘the great watershed’ of the Second World War, tells his story as you might expect a professional soldier to do – plainly, with a tight hold on emotion. He is sent to check up on the odd behaviour of some contacts in the Faroes. From this follows a bizarre mission to flush out a Nazi sympathizer in Orkney involving much Conradian sea-voyaging, some revelatory drinking and the unforgettable image of a frozen corpse tied to a chair and lashed to a bulkhead. Ultimately, the consequences of this ‘grotesque adventure’ return Chisholm to Orkney, where his heart is made whole. Linklater knew all about war. He survived the trenches of the First World War, and rejoined the Army in the Second, where he was assigned to write the official history of the Italian campaign (out of which experience came the wonderfully warm, humorous and optimistic Private Angelo). He was able to write about the ugliness, pain and ludicrousness of war with an extraordinary lightness and humanity, as only an artist who has also been a soldier can. But perhaps this is why he is no longer in fashion. Chisholm, I suspect, is not unlike his creator: ‘I’m orthodox – in the social sense – because I need orthodoxy. I believe in traditions, because without them I wouldn’t know what to do. I don’t walk alone, I take tradition’s hand and go where I’m led.’ A protagonist who is a conservative, decent, professional soldier; a man’s man, who sees holding one’s drink as a virtue and who believes in Britain and America as the guardians of international stability. It’s not exactly so-this-month, is it? But it is this conservatism that is the strength of The Dark of Summer. It is the anchor against which the chaos of war pulls and chafes. Linklater hated extremes. He was passionately opposed to both Nazism and communism and accurately predicted where both would lead. He possessed a clarity of vision, even by the subdued light of the north, that eluded many of his more fashionable contemporaries. Incidentally, Lewis did not live up to the Linklater-tinted picture of my imagination. It was, as far as we could discover, a peat-bog in the middle of the howling Atlantic where you have to wear three layers in the middle of July. The highlight of the visit – for me, at least – was when a phrase from the shipping forecast suddenly coalesced into meaning. ‘This is the Butt of Lewis Lighthouse!’ I shouted above the wind. But my husband was missing a cultural reference or two, and didn’t get it. As for Barabhas, home of the ancestor, it was little more than a fog-shrouded petrol station. We judged the Highland Clearances a good service to the MacDonalds of Ripley, Ontario, and returned early to the mainland.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 8 © Julia Rochester 2005