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First published in 1935, Scottish Journey is a perceptive, subtle and beautifully written account by one of Scotland's greatest modern writers of prose and poetry. Edwin Muir's journey took him from Edinburgh to the Lowlands, to Glasgow and the Highlands, and the book, while a masterpiece of travel writing, is also a quest for the real nature of Scottish identity. T.C. Smout writes in his introduction to this edition:
'Edwin Muir's Scottish Journey has the clarity and impact of a brilliant photograph. As a traveller's account it belongs to a genre familiar in writing about Scotland for centuries, and comprehending such masterpieces as the account of Dr Johnson . . . and the Wordsworths. For writing of this kind it has no real rival in the inter-war years . . . Muir held up a mirror to the face of Scotland all those years ago. It is frightening to see so many recognisable features in its glass.'
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It's this dual sense of detachment and horror that gives his "Scottish Journey" its uniqueness. Muir studies the land of his birth as he travels through it as if he's a newly-landed alien, recording the gloomily-charged atmosphere of Edinburgh tea-rooms and the dwarf alps of the Motherwell bings with equal fascination. In fact it's debatable whether the picture of Scotland which emerges is as much a portrait of Muir himself, and of the politics of the group of writers he belonged to, known as the "Scottish Renaissance", as their shared vision of the twenties dissolved into doubt and dispute during the thirties.
So why should you read a book about Scotland in 1934 if you're neither Scottish nor especially interested in history? Well, because it isn't about those things, but about a search for identity, Scotland's and Muir's, both of which had been broken and lost, and were still in the process of emerging. As the ever-wondering, disappointed but hopeful traveller, Muir speaks for everyone who has tried to piece themselves together from the bits they know. His journey through Scotland speaks to us today as if we're on that voyage with him.
Edwin Muir is a pretty good writer, when he sticks to travelogues and abstract philosophy. He doesn't do so in Scottish Journey, though one would think so from the first hundred pages. Scottish Journey is meant as (and was commissioned as) a travelogue, and for the most part, Muir sticks to the template. He writes well of the Scots countryside, and passably of Edinburgh, slipping in bits of philosophy here and there, as is to be expected in any good travelogue. As well, Muir is an extremely quotable writer; his words are clear and precise, and draw excellent pictures in the reader's mind.
Muir was, however, an ardent Socialist of the closed-minded sort, as much as he professes otherwise. This affects the book in his long chapter on Glasgow, which he starts with a screed against Industrialism (he always capitalizes the word, I might as well, too) and capitalism. Humorously, he attempts to say that Industrialism, in and of itself, isn't all that bad. He does so in a paragraph that spans almost two and a half pages. The first and last few sentences are of the opinion that Industrialism isn't all that bad. It's the middle hundred or so sentences that shoot the argument in the foot, as he catalogs a list of the horrors he sees in Glasgow. One wonders how it's possible to write all these things and frame them with "it's not bad." It would be kind of like a pagan writing the same of the Inquisition, from the evils that Muir ascribes to Industrialism.
What's worse, he can't see the forest for the trees. In one breath, he talks about ho a capitalist system can't take population contraction into account; in the next, he's talking about unemployment. And he sees no correlation between the two, or at least none he's willing to admit. At one point, perhaps the book's nadir, he says, while discussing the rise of the Scottish Nationalist party, "....If such devotion and fidelity are not to be admired, then all our ideas of morality are mistaken." Leaving it as it is, he infers that no such thing could possibly be true. Yet not five pages later, at the beginning of his chapter on the Highlands, he has little good to say about the morality of a people who are so embarrassed by the twin hills known as the Paps of Jura, one of Scotland's biggest tourist draws at the time, that he couldn't find a postcard that showed them clearly anywhere in the town. One is tempted to see the inconsistencies as a (sub?)conscious undercutting of Muir's own arguments, but nothing else in the book points to it; the man's to solid and straightforward a writer to resort to such tricks.
Overall, though, it's worth checking out for the travel writing and the easy read. Just take his political outlook with a grain of salt. ** ½
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