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  • The Impossible "Pure Scientist" Travel, Representation, and the Self in Louis MacNeice's I Crossed the Minch
  • Shannon Derby (bio)

In 1937, Longmans, Green, and Company publishing house commissioned Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice to write a guidebook on the Hebrides. After two visits in the spring and summer of that same year, what MacNeice produced proved to be quite different from a conventional travel guide. Simply put, I Crossed the Minch (1938) is a strange book. Typically, a travel guide includes descriptions of people, places, popular restaurants, hotels, and sites, as well as practical advice for tourists: local customs, transportation information, safety guidelines, language barriers, and such. While MacNeice's text includes some of these elements, it most certainly does not meet the expectations a tourist would have for a traditional guidebook. In fact, readers hoping for an informative guide on Hebridean travel will find instead what Tom Herron describes as 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 weather, the local dogs and much else" (ix–x), including original poetry by MacNeice and sketches by travel (and romantic) partner, Nancy Coldstream (née Sharp). [End Page 85]

MacNeice's deliberate unsettling of the generic formula of the travel guide leads to the following question: how do we read a text composed of multiple, discordant voices and narrative techniques? Within the context of travel writing in the 1930s, the desire to escape, an obsession with holidays, and the pursuit of frivolity in the face of political discord motivated both travel and travel writing. Valentine Cunningham calls attention to the presence of deliberate irony and flouting of tradition during this time period, writing that "the '30s travel book had ousted the novel as writing's loosest, baggiest, most monstrously capacious form" (391). In addition to the time period's focus on experimentation in form, genre, and content, we may also look at MacNeice's previous travels and publication history, namely, his journey to Iceland with W. H. Auden in 1936 and their collaboration on Letters from Iceland (1937). Similar to what MacNeice later did in I Crossed the Minch, Auden and MacNeice filled their text with poetry, prose, and letters to friends, as well as travel narratives, folk stories, and anecdotes. As Richard Danson Brown writes, MacNeice's generic experimentations exhibit the influence of Auden's "redefinition of lightness" (61) in poetry, in which he argues against esoteric modes of post-Romantic "pure poetry" and "difficult" poetry in favor of a more egalitarian poetic project of engaging with one's readers and community. Although he maintains that MacNeice did not simply follow in the footsteps of Auden, Brown argues that MacNeice's publications in the 1930s couple personal and political depth with the lightness of form. In this body of work, the pursuit of honesty supersedes the pursuit of truth because, according to MacNeice, scientific objectivity and the genre of personal writing such as the journal are incompatible. I Crossed the Minch, which follows in the footsteps of Letters from Iceland, engages with the notion of truth—and the impossibility of attaining it—through travel journals and autobiographical sketches. Because MacNeice's role in writing Letters from Iceland has been downplayed and, at times, overlooked, I turn to I Crossed the Minch to emphasize MacNeice's creative engagement with the genre of travel writing, which moves beyond Auden's poetic project and articulates his own subjective perspective on place, culture, and politics.

In this essay, I focus on the tangential chapter "Dialogue with My Guardian Angel"—which in actuality serves as a thematic guidepost for I Crossed the Minch—in order to shed light on the complicated role of [End Page 86] representation within the genre of travel writing. Given MacNeice's level of formal and narrative experimentation in this text, the emergence of a guardian angel should be unsurprising. In "Dialogue," MacNeice imagines a conversation with his guardian angel, who addresses the topics of nostalgia, politics, class, and travel. Within the hermeneutics of travel, the guardian angel locates...

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