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Louis MacNeice |
Dyspeptic observations from a tripper to the Hebrides
Following our recent two-part feature on Louis MacNeice, Anthony Thwaite reviews one of poet’s more idiosyncratic books
I CROSSED THE MINCH. By Louis MacNeice.
Polygon £9.99 order this book
AN unusual product of the MacNeice centenary is the reissue, almost 70 years after its first publication, of MacNeice’s I Crossed the Minch – largely prose, a sort of “travel book”, but also containing poems, and altogether highly idiosyncratic.
In the spring and summer of 1937, MacNeice travelled to the Outer Hebrides.
He had been commissioned by Longman, for a fee of £75. His first marriage had recently broken up, he needed money, and he travelled with his new partner Nancy. Sometimes with Nancy, often alone, he drifted about, full of observations and opinions, ignorant of Gaelic – at that time the prevalent tongue of the inhabitants.
He commented self-disparagingly that this “is a tripper’s book written by someone who was disappointed and tantalised by the islands and seduced by them only to be reminded that on that soil he will always be an outsider”.
The editor of this re-issue, Tom Herron, expresses very well what this book is: “A glorious hybrid of elements: travel narrative, journal entries; exchanges between imaginary characters; passages of local history; personal autobiography and childhood reminiscences; witty letters to friends (W H Auden in particular); anecdotes; literary parodies; complaints about the food; the local dogs, and much else...” – and of course poems, including two of his best, “Bagpipe Music (“It’s no go the merrygoround...”) and “Leaving Barra” (“The dazzle on the sea, my darling...”).
Though MacNeice’s childhood was spent in Northern Ireland, his father’s family came from the west of Ireland, and MacNeice went to the Hebrides partly hoping to find that blood was thicker than ink – “that the Celt in me would be drawn to the surface by the magnetism of his fellows. This was a sentimental and futile hope.”
Disappointment and ignorance, laced with mordant observation, are more familiar ingredients of travel books today (witness Bill Bryson) than they were in the mid-1930s. MacNeice’s dyspeptic temper is entertaining.
Published in 1938, for many years this book has been unavailable, a handful of copies of it going for high prices to specialist MacNeice collectors. The reprint by a Scottish firm, Polygon of Edinburgh, all these years later is very welcome.
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