![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Oswell Blakeston’s four now largely forgotten travel books, Portuguese Panorama (1955), Isle of St. Helena (1957), Sun at Midnight: Finland Holiday (1958), and Thank You Now: An Exploration of Ulster (1960), warrant the attention of contemporary scholars of travel writing. This article outlines how Blakeston’s writing about his travels, or holidays, further illuminates contemporary historical explorations of the continuum, rather than categorical opposition, between tourist guidebooks and travel writing. Blakeston's travel writing also exhibits a degree of what Debbie Lisle describes as “political reflexivity”. Related to this, his work narrates ethical interactions with new friends encountered on his journeys, while also dramatising some of the inevitable limitations this entails. Analysis of Blakeston’s travel writing also highlights links between the preoccupations detailed above and his queer modernist cultural lineage. This article therefore expands our historical understanding of the diversity of queer British travel writing during the twentieth century.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The core members of the POOL group, active in the late 1920s and early 1930s, comprised the modernist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), writer and modernist patron Bryher, and the writer and film maker Kenneth Macpherson.
2 Blakeston valued other travel writers’ idiosyncratic observations as well, for example Paul Theroux’s description in The Old Patagonian Express of “the sign in a Bogota church warning the devout that pints of holy water may be collected in bottles but never in jugs” (Blakeston Citation1979, 12).
3 For further discussion of the SNI’s activities, see Costa Citation2013.
4 For further discussion of the Villier book, see Martins Citation2008.
5 For different reasons, Sun at Midnight and Thank You Now do not exhibit the same degree of political reflexivity as their predecessors. In the former, Blakeston simply accepts at face value “the vitality of Finnish Democracy and the courage of Finnish Independence” (Blakeston Citation1958a, 11). In a reversal of his attitude towards the Portuguese SNI, Blakeston also wrote a laudatory introduction to a subsequent book of photographs of Finland, many of which were supplied by the Finnish Tourist Association (Blakeston Citation1960b). Thank You Now narrates aspects of Ulster’s political history but does so from a relatively non-partisan perspective. This can be explained partly in terms of commercial considerations. Portuguese Panorama could potentially alienate some Salazar supporters in Portugal, and Isle of St. Helena some readers on an island with a minuscule population (he reported that it was in fact banned from public libraries on the island [Blakeston Citation1958c, 5]), but both outcomes would have a negligible impact upon potential sales. Thank You Now, however, is about an English-speaking province of the United Kingdom, where readers are likely to be interested in a book about where they live, as evidenced by reviews in the Ulster press (Waugh Citation1960, 6). Its appendix also includes practical travel advice on air and sea routes from New York and Philadelphia to Belfast, indicating the publisher’s hopes for an American readership, particularly Irish Americans, both Protestant and Catholic. Thank You Now highlights many connections between Ulster and America, noting for example the number of presidents who can trace their ancestry back to the area. These considerations help to explain the book’s relatively non-partisan stance.
6 A statement of Blakeston’s politics around this time can be found in Blakeston Citation1958b.
7 Blakeston continued to advocate anti-racism during the period when he was writing his travel books, critiquing for example “the exclusiveness of certain trade unions complete with their colour bars” (Citation1958b, 7).
8 Also significant in this context is the section of Portuguese Panorama on art which Blakeston identifies as written by Chapman (Blakeston Citation1955a, 89–91).
9 Other examples of reciprocity include the appeal Blakeston posted in Peace News for penpals to write to islanders in St. Helena (Anon Citation1957, 5). He also mentioned in correspondence with Bryher that he and Max hosted some Finnish visitors in London soon after their visit to Finland (New Haven, The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale Collection of American Literature, Bryher Papers, Letter from Oswell Blakeston to Bryher, April 15 1958, Box 3, Folder 129). I am grateful to Polly Hember for this reference and for information about the Bryher-Blakeston correspondence more generally.
10 This tradition has since largely died out in England.
11 Blakeston enjoyed this anecdote so much that he quoted it on at least one other occasion; Blakeston Citation1968, 14.
12 Soon after the end of his travel writing cycle, Blakeston published two essays celebrating London pubs. See Blakeston Citation1960c; Citation1961.
13 These descriptors would also have placed Blakeston’s books outside the purview of early proponents of academic research into travel writing, who were inclined to seek serious texts to validate as worthy of study.