SHORT BIOGRAPHIES

THERE WAS A LARGE catalogue of short biographies of, and references to, Graham published in his lifetime, most of which were eulogies. Those of interest include Robert Birkmyre’s ‘An Appreciation of Cunninghame Graham’ (1908), which was based on an interview with his subject, and which described Graham as ‘a protean personality capable of the most chameleon-like variations’. Amy Wellington’s more incisive ‘An Artist-Fighter in English Prose’ (1918) described Graham as ‘the boldest, most original and unpopular of living British writers’, and Robert Lynd’s Old and New Masters (1919), described him as a grandee of contemporary literature and of revolutionary politics. Bernard Muddiman’s Men of the Nineties (1920), lavished praise on Graham’s evocations of exotic lands, and C. Lewis Hind’s More Authors and I (1922) described ‘this grandee of the mob’ as someone who wrote of things seen on the byways of life, ‘which he finds more vitalising than the high-roads’.

Similar praise continued after his death. A typical example, entitled ‘Don Roberto’, was published by the author and playwright Samuel Levy Bensusan, and described Graham as essentially democratic, a friend of all classes, a linguist, a fine storyteller, and a master of style equal to Anatole France. All his work was an expression of his fundamental sympathy for the underdog and contempt for material commercialism. A trickle of articles continued through the 1940s, including in a book entitled Twentieth Century Authors, in which Graham was described as:

The centenary of Graham’s birth in 1952 briefly generated renewed interest, and perhaps a more questioning approach to how he had previously been depicted. Hamish Henderson’s article, referenced in the Introduction, critiqued Paul Bloomfield’s anthology of Graham’s sketches, and criticised Graham’s early biographers, declaring that Graham, like Robert Burns, was honoured for wrong or at least irrelevant reasons. Henderson insisted that it was not for being a legendary figure that Graham should be remembered, but rather fancifully, that he emerged from the recognisable Scottish traditions of ‘the soldier of fortune and the wandering scholar … the penniless clansman who regarded himself as the equal of any king’.