Magnus Merriman (2 page)

All this would tend to confirm the early view Magnus had of himself in London: that he was ‘Troilus with a cold in his nose, not sighing but sneezing towards the Grecian tents … Romeo under the wrong window, Ajax with a boil in his armpit'. After all, his great Renaissance long poem which was to sort out Scotland's ills, first through satire and then through regenerative forward planning, fails because he finds it's easy to satirize but hard to construct.
The Returning Sun
, it was called, and its progress and its fate parallel Magnus's own. Linklater intends us to see the pun, and the bathos. But again, this is to ignore the other voice the author uses. Certainly Magnus is brought down to earth, but after a drunken debauch he is still allowed his equivalent of MacDiarmid's Drunk Man's epiphany. Viewing the whitened landscape of his island after a storm, Magnus perceives a final beauty which this time the sceptical author does not
contradict. ‘Tears sprang to his eyes to see such loveliness, and perception like a bird in his breast sang that this land was his and he was one with it … Patriotism and the waving of flags was an empty pride, but love of one's own country, of the little acres of one's birth, was the navel-string to life.' This is
not
to be confused with other, deceptive, ‘epiphanies', such as Magnus's final and most consoling dream, in which he imagines Peter, his son, becoming a great scholar and statesman—on no valid basis whatsoever. By comparison the white truth of Orkney is allowed to stand, against all the other
chimaeras
of the hero's life.

And so, in the end, after laughing gently at more serious Renaissance poets and novelists, Linklater wheels round to join them. Magnus's final perceptions are those of Finn of
The Silver Darlings
or Chris of
Sunset Song
. Nevertheless, Linklater has still warned against finding glib and ever-easy consolation in spurious ideals and delusive identifications with a nature which may or may not care for its creations. His sceptical voice is a vital and healthy one in Scottish and English literature.

Douglas Gifford

The early life of Magnus Merriman was uneventful except for the usual essays and accidents of boyhood which, though they might be magnified into special significance by anyone with a case to prove, were truly of no great interest. The only remarkable feature of his youthful development was a curious change of temper that occurred when he was twelve or thirteen years old. Till then he had been unduly sensitive, sulky, and unhappy. A disorderly imagination had made him cowardly, while a mixture of laziness and false shame induced a constipated habit that naturally affected his temper. But suddenly, as though he had been waiting for his voice to break before he declared his authority, he became a leader of the neighbouring children, and displaying a talent for noise and vulgarity that none had previously suspected, turned the tables on time by bullying the small brothers of the boys who had previously tortured him. At the same time his brain quickened, and he showed abundant cleverness of that youthful kind which so often is regarded as the prelude to a brilliant maturity. But the abruptness with which the costive timidity of his childhood had been overlaid with the truculent inspiration of adolescence gave little promise of stability.

The son of a country schoolmaster in the parish of St Magnus, in the Mainland of Orkney, Magnus was born in 1897. Having acquired from his father and a female assistant teacher in his father's school the useful and customary elements of education, he was sent to the city of Inverdoon, the seat of the most northerly university in Britain and of a school some six hundred years old that was well thought of locally, but whose tradition of classical education had been much impaired by modern commercialism and the resulting importance attached to certain statutory examinations. From
his teachers at the Inverdoon Academy, solid unimaginative men, Magnus obtained a moderate amount of information, often accompanied by thrashing with a leather strap, but neither incentive to further scholarship nor stimulus to the creative spirit that was dormant in him.

In 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war, he returned to Inverdoon from his summer vacation in Orkney with the intention of proceeding to the University, but instead of that enlisted in a Territorial Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders and spent the next few months in training in Bedford. He found discipline irksome, and was at first extremely clumsy in performing the simple exercises demanded of a private soldier. At the handling of arms and on the range he became tolerably expert in time, but fatigue duties he constantly endeavoured to escape without the ingenuity necessary to their successful evasion, and such matters as maintaining his equipment in military tidiness, and producing in due form and order the requisite number of articles at the weekly kit-inspection, were for ever beyond his power. In consequence of this he endured a multitude of minor punishments and acquired the habit, on pay-nights, of forgetting the unhappiness of his existence in the canteen. At the age of seventeen a few glasses of beer were sufficient to fortify his spirit with remarkable gaiety, and he discovered under their influence an extravagant improper humour that was greatly to the liking of his companions, who encouraged him to drink more and more when they found that he was able to compose, with sufficient stimulation, witty and slanderous verses about the officers and sergeants of their battalion. These canteen lampoons were Merriman's first experiment in literature.

He went to France with the reputation of a troublesome and unprofitable soldier, but when the formality of army life grew thin, as it did in the trenches, and when dirtiness became a uniform condition rather than a crime, he found fewer difficulties to contend with and was increasingly well-thought-of by his superiors. He was strongly built, but slender, and though above the middle size he was not so tall as to find his height a handicap in troglodyte warfare. He was never notable for bravery, but on occasion
showed something like recklessness, that was due either to excitement or to inadequate apprehension of the circumstances: for he became interested in the war, or such a minute portion of it as he was acquainted with, and was inclined to form heterodox opinions about its conduct. He was promoted to the rank of corporal and began to think hungrily of decorations. He decided to win a Distinguished Conduct Medal and some French award before applying for a commission, so that his uniform might be well prepared for the additional glories, in time, of a Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order. And while his thoughts grew more and more romantic his conduct became increasingly efficient, so that Captain Duguid, his company commander, once said somewhat optimistically, ‘Merriman is the best N C O in the battalion'.

Unfortunately an incident occurred soon after this that entirely changed Captain Duguid's opinion and completely destroyed Merriman's ambition, at least for some considerable time. It was an incident of a type that he was to become familiar with later in his life, for in his fortune there seemed, ever and again, to be an element of buffoonery that would trip his heels whenever his head was highest, and lay clownish traps for him in the most serious places. He adventured for a medal and had his stripes cut away; whenever he played Romeo he tripped over the chamber pot; and his political hopes were to be spoiled by a ludicrous combination of circumstances. But in 1916 those catastrophes lay far away in the future, unimagined, almost unimaginable, for the horizon was still occluded by war.

One morning Corporal Merriman was informed that he was to accompany Captain Duguid with four men on a reconnoitring patrol that night. The news at first inspired in him the customary feeling of gloomy foreboding, but in a short while he was cheered by the thought that this might be an opportunity to secure the Distinguished Conduct Medal, for the patrol was to be an important one, and when midnight came, the hour at which they were to start, he was in high spirits. They crowded out of the trench, Captain Duguid slightly in advance, and passed through an opening in the barbed wire to no-man's-land. Slowly and with great
circumspection they approached the German line. When a Very light soared over them they lay immobile till the light should die. But Merriman made the mistake of lying on his side and keeping his eyes on the flaring brightness, so that when it sank into the darkness he was momentarily blind. The Captain whispered ‘Come on!' Merriman, lurching forward on his belly, thrust his bayonet stiffly ahead of him and heard a muffled cry of pain.

‘What's the matter?' he asked.

Another muted whimper answered him first, and a moment later one of the patrol, in the broad untroubled accents of Buchan, said hoarsely, ‘Michty God, you've fair ruined the Captain. You've stuck your bayonet clean up his airse!'

Corporal Merriman's response was to roll on his back and let fly a great ringing shout of laughter. The Captain cried petulantly, ‘Be quiet, you fool!' The nearest private clapped a muddy hand on his mouth. But the damage was done, and after a brief interval of silence—as though the world were shocked at this noise so irreverent in the midst of war—machine-guns opened their iron stutter, star-shells lit the sky, and grenades burst dully in the neighbouring soil. For half an hour the patrol lay in acute danger and discomfort, and then crept miserably back to their own lines with three men wounded in addition to the Captain.

Corporal Merriman had his stripes removed for conduct prejudicial to the maintenance of order and military discipline, his vision of a bemedalled tunic vanished like a rainbow, and Captain Duguid went home on a stretcher, face-downwards. Some months later, on the Somme, Merriman himself was wounded in the shoulder during a brief but hurried retreat, and having recuperated very pleasantly in a volunteer hospital, applied for and received a commission. He was then sent to Mesopotamia, and after considerable service in conditions of torrid heat, fever, and monotony, was ordered to join the force organized by Major-General Dunsterville for service in Persia. This fortunate adventure had a most important influence on his subsequent career.

He remained with Dunsterville's small army throughout its romantic existence, and journeyed with it into Southern
Russia. In the retreat from Baku he so distinguished himself that he was recommended for the Military Cross, but his perverse fate still unhappily pursued him. In the dull green calm of the Caspian Sea he made his first acquaintance with vodka, and such was its inflammatory influence that he defied all restraint and led a deputation of three to the Commander-in-Chief with an impolitic suggestion to return and launch an immediate counter-attack, that would give him a chance to win a bar for his promised medal. The resulting court martial behaved with laudable clemency, and balanced his impropriety by cancelling the recommendation for the Military Cross.

Peace being at last concluded, Merriman left the army with none of the decorations he had coveted, but only the service medals that indicated an undistinguished though useful capacity to survive or elude the perils and rigours of campaigning in the Twentieth Century.

He returned to Inverdoon and enrolled himself at the University in the Honours School of English Language and Literature. This he did partly in obedience to the impulse which had stirred him to compose improper verses in the army, and partly from a belief that the study of English literature would entail less work than the study of French and German, the classics, pure science, applied science, law, medicine or divinity. The next two years he passed very pleasantly, contentedly occupied with the charming trivialities of University life. He often drank too much, he talked endlessly about the war with other returned soldiers, and he seldom thought seriously for more than a few minutes about any subject whatsoever.

Then, almost simultaneously, the dormant creative spirit in him began to wake and he fell violently in love with a girl called Margaret Innes, a medical student. She was uncommonly good-looking, dark and slender, with a graceful figure, a pretty mouth, and eyes of a gay and lively beauty. She conveyed, moreover, the impression that she possessed some inner reserve of strength and a secret wisdom of some kind, so that her smallest remarks seemed more valuable or significant than other people's conversation, since they were made in the warm shadow of this mysterious hinterland of
knowledge or emotional force. She had a large number of male friends, whose attentions she encouraged so far as was consistent with an impregnable chastity, and it was some time before Magnus could obtain her undivided attention. He succeeded at last, and for some eight or ten weeks was supremely happy except for a recurrent feeling that she was in some essential way—other than her continued virginity—untouched by him and remote from his comprehension. That was a winter term. In the spring she laughed at him and divided her time between the captain of the University golf team and a professional violinist in the town. As a result of her virtuous favours the golfer went off his game and the violinist often played with mournful inaccuracy: but Margaret Innes continued to live so competently that she derived nothing but enjoyment from their company, and performed her work in the hospital wards with unimpaired efficiency.

For Magnus the year was productive but ill-managed. He wrote a great deal of flamboyant verse and acquired a reputation for amusing eccentricity when drunk. Stories of his exploits began to circulate, and his more improper
mots
were widely repeated. In the early months of 1923 there was a brief but ardent recrudescence of his affair with Margaret Innes, and in March of that year she took a very respectable degree and almost immediately secured a position as Resident Surgeon in a hospital in Bradleigh in the North of England. They did not meet again for a long time. In the June of the same year Magnus, with some difficulty, took Second Class Honours in English and celebrated his good fortune by drinking so long with the Lecturer in Anglo-Saxon that they quarrelled violently over the rival merits of Beowulf and the Saga of Burn Njal. Continuing their argument in the street, they presently assaulted each other and were both arrested. They found bail, however, without much difficulty—the police were broad-minded and they had many friends—and the brawl had no more consequence than a little quiet scandal.

A month later Magnus was interviewed by the Principal of the United Churches' College in Bombay, himself a graduate of Inverdoon, and obtained an appointment as lecturer in
English Literature recently made vacant by the death from malaria of the previous occupant—he also had been a native of Inverdoon. Magnus had no interest in missionary enterprise, but he had long nursed a romantic desire to see India and the opportunity now offered seemed too good to miss. The dominant motive obscured the minor implications of his decision, and he gave little thought to the nature of his immediate environment and the manner in which he would be required to behave as one of the staff of the Churches' College. He speedily found his obligations irksome, and had not malaria and dysentery made such constant attacks on his colleagues that their number was always under strength his appointment would certainly have terminated long before it did.

During his three years in Bombay he published two books of verse, the first at his own expense. The second, though much better, resulted in his dismissal from the College. It contained a poem entitled
Number Seven
that told, in a spirit of brilliant comedy and galloping Hudibrastic lines, the events of an evening in a house of ill-fame in the neighbourhood of Grant Road; and another, called
The Sahibs
, that described with lively satire a dance at the Yacht Club. The Principal found these verses so distressing to read and so horrible to remember that he was compelled to ask Magnus to resign: that the author of
Number Seven
should teach literature on a Christian basis was manifestly impossible, and Magnus was requested to forego the courtesy of notice and leave at once.

It happened about the same time that a man called Meiklejohn, a gifted but intemperate Scot on the editorial staff of the
Bombay
Post
, found it politic to sever his connection with that eminently respectable newspaper. He and Merriman decided to go home together, and to travel by a route more interesting than second class Ρ & 0 cabins. They made some perfunctory inquiries and haphazard arrangements and set out, through Baluchistan, for Persia. By hired cars that frequently broke down they drove to Meshed in north-eastern Persia, and made an abortive attempt to reach Merv in the Turkoman Republic. Failing to cross the frontier they turned on their tracks and
without more difficulty than wayside mishaps arrived in Teheran. From there they travelled north, through Kasvin, across the impressive Elburz mountains, and down their superbly wooded Caspian slope to Pahlevi. Here Magnus was on familiar ground, for he had spent some weeks in the sturgeon port while serving with General Dunsterville; and when they took ship and crossed to Baku he enjoyed the sensation of revisiting Baladjari where, in 1918, he had so nearly won a Military Cross.