Educated at Glenalmond, he did his National Service in the Cameron Highlanders and later with the Gordon Highlanders on the Rhine, whom he remembered for their "petty squabbling for authority in the mess". This period was to form the basis for his first, and most memorable novel, Tunes of glory. At Oxford, he studied politics, philosophy and economics, and toyed with the idea of politics as a career before gradually realising that he wanted to write. He joined a London publisher and married an Oxford student, Susan Edmonds.
Kennaway's first literary success came with the publication of the short story The Dollar Bottom in Lilliput in 1954. Two years later he published Tunes of glory. An apparently simple but tense novel, it revolved around rivalry, a theme that, in many forms, dominated all Kennaway's fiction. It is the tale of conflict between the tough, acting colonel, Jock Sinclair and Basil Barrow, a public-school product, trained at Sandhurst, who nominally takes charge. The two vie for supremity in bleak Scottish barracks which are clearly modelled on Kennaway's own first military home, the Queen's Barracks in Perth. The opening paragraph of the novel is an accomplished piece of storytelling: "There is a high wall that surrounds Campbell Barracks, and in the winter there is often a layer of snow on top of it. No civilian rightly knows what happens behind that grey wall but everybody is always curious, and people were more than ever curious one January a year or two ago." A taut and moving tragedy, it drew great plaudits, winning praise even from such notoriously anti-Scottish critics as Evelyn Waugh who admitted that it revealed "a powerful natural talent which may develop into something important". It was later made into a compelling film, starring Alec Guinness.
Although he devoted himself now to writing, Kennaway never matched the success of his first novel. Subsequent works include the novels Household ghosts (1961), Some gorgeous accident (1967) - which was largely based on his own experience of infidelity, following his wife's affair with David Cornwall (the novelist John Le Carre) - and The Cost of living like this (1969), which each played with triangular sexual relationships. Despite the overtly Scottish provenance for many of his stories, Kennaway distanced himself from Scotland and insisted that he was a "writer from Scotland" referring disparagingly to the country as "a bad society".
After a spell in Hollywood writing scripts Kennaway returned to writing novels or film adaptations of books. Increasingly volatile in his personal life, he was haunted by his father's early death, wishing to cram as much experience as possible into a short space. His fear was prophetic. He died at forty, on 21 December 1968, when he suffered a coronary while driving. His posthumously published novel Silence is regarded as some as equalling Tunes of Glory in quality, but remains far less well known.
-- Rosemary Goring
Scottish playwright and novelist who entered films in 1958 with VIOLENT PLAYGROUND (1958). He adapted his novel for the screenplay of TUNES OF GLORY (1960) and wrote screenplays for THE MIND BENDERS (1973), THE SHOES OF THE FISHERMAN (1968), BATTLE OF BRITAIN (1969) and COUNTRY DANCE (1970, also play and novel Household Ghosts).
Nominated for Writing (Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium) 1960: TUNES OF GLORY
1 nomination