'Farewell the Castle in the Air'

I came late to Louis MacNeice – preoccupied as I was, like many before me, with his friend W.H. Auden – and have tried to make up for my tardiness by reading him closely and often. In 1937 he tramped around the Hebrides, like Johnson and Boswell, with the intention of writing a travel book. The result, I Crossed the Minch, is loosely organized and a little disappointing. There’s something forced about the narrative, as though MacNeice sensed he couldn't rival the brilliance of his poetry and, incidentally, had to justify his publisher’s advance.

The Minch is the strait northwest of Scotland that separates the mainland from the Outer Hebrides. This is ripe subject matter. The best travel writers – Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert – don’t produce dutiful, passive transcripts of experience. Often they are on a quest for knowledge or enlightenment. They mingle history and close observation. They are autobiographical in the sense that Montaigne’s essays are autobiographical.

MacNeice occasionally crosses the paths described in Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and Boswell’s A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Like his predecessors, MacNeice is democratically erudite. Along the way he alludes to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Donald Duck, the Powys brothers, cricket, Sunlight Soap, Charles Laughton’s role as Rembrandt and much Irish, Scottish and English history. He works in passages written as verse and inserts others parodying the styles of Walter Pater, D.H. Lawrence, Yeats and Hemingway (“He put his hands in his pockets and opened the door with his knee. He went out into the rain. The rain was raining.”) MacNeice has a sense of humor. He writes:

“After lunch I walked up to Arnabost and took the road to the left, leaving it at Grishipol (which means Pig Steading) to visit the house where Dr. Johnson stayed. The house is beautifully situated by the sea—of grey stone, with no roof, but the three broad chimneys remain. It is not a big house and is full of weeds and dung. In holes in the wall there are pigeons’ nests, which contained baby pigeons covered with yellow down. If it had been Shelley who stayed here, how people would gush about this place.”

Shelley is likely the most irritating poet in the language, at least before the birth of Sharon Olds, and it’s nice to see MacNeice take a shot at the narcissistic twit. He shares Auden’s northern temperament. A subdued melancholy in his work is muted by a gift for celebration (not unlike Auden and Johnson – especially the latter). He is a genial man comfortable in solitude. His humor can be somber in the Irish fashion. In this passage from late in I Crossed the Minch, I admire the way MacNeice simulates one’s progression from callow to seasoned while retaining the sense of improvised Irish gusto:

“When I was nineteen and twenty I was very excited if I walked up a road. Because, like a character in G.K. Chesterton, I expected some adventure round the corner. But now I realize that, contrary to adolescent expectations, adventures are not things which happen at random. The globe-trotter, the flaneur, the wandering dilettante of sensations, these are not the people who get adventures. An adventure must be important to the adventurer. You cannot collect them with scissors and a pot of paste. You must work for them. They must be related to your work and come to you in the course of it. Farewell the castle in the air which never saw hod or trowel.”