Resumo de Juan In America

Remembering a Fine Author - ERIC LINKLATER
By
P.G.Murthy (PG)

Even though living by writing is a difficult profession there is continuous proliferation of many authors and their mediocre books. It is however sad to see good writers lost in oblivion. One such casualty lost by the wayside is Eric Linklater, an author of great talent.
Born in 1899 in South Wales, Linklater was educated at the Aberdeen University and even as a medical student he realised that his passions lay elsewhere. Abandoning medicine as a career and taking an Arts degree he came to Bombay as the Assistant Editor of the Times of India. Few could match his mercurial style and the racy flowery language that embellished his numerous books over the next few decades.
In the intervening years between the two infamous wars of this century many writers continued to turn out quality literature and one gets the impression that, for one thing, they could insulate themselves from the senseless violence of the times and continue writing inimitable stories, readable even 50 years later. Linklater was one who took some of his raw material from sad sordid experiences witnessed in the wars. ?The Impregnable Women? is one such novel where women revolt against the men in which their sons and husbands perish for no real worthy cause except for the ambition of some quixotic statesman. The author writes of the snow bound frozen earth which would not allow the dead to be buried indignant as it were that they have brought such needless slaughter to be hidden under its crust. The women launch a non-cooperation movement on the home front and organise themselves into an army (with a variety of weapons ranging from kitchen knives, pokers and batons) to fight pitched battles with their men. The bizarre plot makes hilarious reading. Describing the women who assembled in a hall for an emergency meeting, the author in this hilarious novel writes, ?the audience had been mixed like the ingredients of a plum pudding? and when the women stood in formation for military drill, ?they stood like violets in row after row in a garden?. The men, worn out in this unequal and odd domestic conflict, emerge in the early hours from their homes ?with their eyes dull red like brothel lamps?.
Linklater?s prolific writings covered a wide range of settings. His was a life of travel and adventure and he filled stories with imaginative scenes with the energy of brilliant eloquence. Whatever be the context, he never failed in his choice of words, packed with vigour and an element of surprise, which always leaves the reader stunned. Of particular interest is his autobiography ?The Man on My Back? which has some frank observations on his life and problems. One is touched by a degree of perceptible honesty in his narration. He worked as a tutor in the University and had to take classes for a group of lady students. Linklater writes that he ?wished he had thought of serving them tea and small pastries, for my lectures were the merest gossip, and the tinkle of spoon upon china would have been a proper accompaniment?.
After an agonizing interview before the Selection Committee for the Cornell University Fellowship Linklater was selected and he sailed to America, the land of opportunity. He brought out a novel ?Juan in America?, the adventures of the descendent of the legendary Don Juan. ?Juan in China? and more than other twenty novels, including some with historical background, and numerous short stories, some mystical and eerie, followed this which took Linklater high up in the galaxy of contemporary writers.
Linklater?s virtue as a prose writer was his ability to overlay humorous situations with serious implications couched in sensuous imagery. His ability to handle wit and pathos in various situations is seen from his short stories, one of which ?Joy as it flies? received a prestigious prize.
In ?The Man on My Back? a narration of his method of writing could be sound advice to any aspiring writer:
?I am a laborious worker, and must worry myself into a state of pernicious excitement before I can write with an appearance of ease. I have an active imagination, and in a modest way I am capable of invention. I have also an interest in words which is like an honest carpenter?s interest in wood. Bring together these two conditions, and you have an incipient novelist. Bring to his experience the rapture of conception, and you have a novelist condemned to work. Rapture, I said. The finding, development, and first rough shaping of an idea are among the compulsive and overwhelming pleasures under the sun. But then comes work. Then comes the finer shaping, the forcing into a pattern, the bending of thought, the ferreting for words, the discarding of words, the comparing of two good words to find the better. This is labour, and the brain will take heat like a blacksmith?s iron in the blown fire, and the heat may sometimes, about midnight, engender a paragraph that gives a little pleasure to the novelist before he stumbles into bed. But in the morning he must blot and banish and scribble anew. Hard labour. ?
Eric Linklater passed away in 1974. The world of literature can be enriched if the works of Linklater are back on the bookshelves.
By
P.G.Murthy (PG)

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