Et in Orcadia ego
Francis King
THE GOOSE GIRL AND OTHER STORIES by Eric Linklater Canongate, £15.95, pp. 306 In 'A Sociable Plover', one of the least successful items in this selection of Eric Linklater's stories ranging over some 40 years, the protagonist, a writer, looks back on his career. His first novel sold 50,000 in Britain, almost as many in the States. 1940 was his best year, with 60,000 sold in Britain and 83,000 in the States, and £15,000 earned in film rights. After that, there followed 'a dribbling diminuendo of critical appreciation' and 'a cascade of falling sales'. In the previous year, 'the best book I have written yet' sold a mere 2,300 copies in Britain and none abroad.
.It might be his own career that Eric Linklater is here describing. In the Thirties — which were his own thirties — he had two best-sellers in Poet's Pub and Juan in America. In the Forties, there was another best-seller, Private Angelo, made into a film With a youthful Peter Ustinov cast, un- expectedly but not unsuccessfully, in the role of the hero, an Italian soldier born Without the gift of courage. But after that, with an occasional halt or upward bump, it was downhill all the way, so that, 15 years after his death, Linklater's name is not one that one hears all that often, even in his native Scotland. Such neglect is un-
deserved. At his best he brought a fertile imagination and a sharp satirical eye to his fiction.
Linklater himself once warned readers of his short stories that 'He who looks for cousinhood of theme and consistency of treatment will be disappointed' — he had, he declared, always been 'self-indulgent and plagued by fear of boredom' and, in consequence, he rarely wrote the same thing twice. This makes a selection like this difficult to review. In general, however, Linklater's stories fell into one of two categories: the whimsical and fey, and the realistic and worldly. It is the whimsical and fey stories which suffer most from his besetting literary vice, a wilful over- elaboration of style. In 'The Dancers', a group of people are 'consanguineous, allied and presumptively allied': and when, in the manner of Barrie's Mary Rose, they totally vanish off the face of the earth on a visit to an uninhabited Orkney Island on Midsummer's Eve, theirs is 'a joint occulta- tion'. In a later story we learn of 'an occlu-
dent kiss', and in one even later of 'a tangle, a reticulation, a repeated intersection of roads'.
Stories in this first category often deal, as in 'The Dancers', with the fabulous and supernatural. One of the best known, 'The Goose Girl', is a retelling, in a modern Orkney setting, of the myth of Leda, with a goose taking the place of the swan. In another of the best known, 'Sealskin Trousers', a girl is first wooed by a silkie (a seal which has taken on human form) and then agrees to accompany him, now herself transformed into a seal, on his return to the sea. 'A Sociable Plover' describes how the writer protagonist is driven mad and destroyed by a witch's fetch, in the form of a bird, sent by two people whom he grievously wronged many years before. (That Linklater's own Orkney grandmother had been generally believed to have been a witch may have had something to do with the genesis of this story).
There will certainly be readers who will favour these tales of pagan superstition, ungodly powers and animistic myth; but my own preference is for those in which Linklater is more down-to-earth. Worthy of Maugham both in its narrative skill and the cynical twist at its close, is 'The Wrong Story', in which the novelist narrator, hav- ing witnessed, on a tourist visit to New Orleans, a flirtation between his guide and a middle-aged Middle-Western widow in the same party, attempts to imagine what will follow for the couple. He gets every event right, except the final and most important of all. Worthy of Maugham too is 'The Actress Olenina', in which the pro- tagonist, having picked up a fellow Russian, a waiter, in London at the out- break of the first world war on an impulse of sentimental solidarity, decides that she does not really fancy him and bribes her female servant, 40 and heavily moustached, to do her living — and loving — for her. Not Maugham but Kipling might have writ- ten the early and succinct 'Pathans'. Set in India, it deals with a gruesome and squalid murder.
All in all, here is a welcome reminder of Linklater's skill, verve and variety as a story-teller. If there were a male counter- part of Virago Press (Male Chauvinist Pig Press?), then Linklater is precisely the sort of author whom it should, and, one, hopes, would, be reissuing.
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