Books: Poets' Account

LETTERS FROM ICELAND—W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice—Random House ($3).

In the summer of 1936 young English Poet Wystan Hugh Auden got a publisher's advance for a trip to Iceland, "to write a book." Forthwith he asked young Irish Poet Louis MacNeice to come along. For several months the two poets toured the fishy, subArctic, volcanic island, sat around in its corrugated-iron farmhouses and dumpish hotels. When their time was up they had written a number of letters in prose and verse, collected a farrago of literate jottings about Iceland's history, culture, landscape, people. These, illustrated by photographs and stitched loosely together into a book, give an entertaining view of Iceland from the outside, a more significant inside view of Poets Auden and MacNeice.

Born contemporaries, the two poets are, in most things else, remote relations. Irish MacNeice finds Iceland interesting chiefly as one more queer spot in which to wonder what the devil he is doing there. Sometimes he tries to give a laughless explanation:

. . . the crude

Embryo rummages every latitude

Looking for itself, its nature, its final

pattern. . . .

But Author MacNeice does his best work when he is laughing up his Celtic sleeve at the cordial disrespect with which the general run of things inspires him. His letter, Hetty to Nancy, turns a camping trip into a near-masterpiece of burlesquerie, describes, among other things, a pneumatic mattress—"sighing like something out of A. E. Housman;" the three kinds of Central Iceland scenery—"Stones, More Stones, and All Stones;" a tourist party of middle-aged Englishwomen — "with ankles lapping down over their shoes and a puglike expression of factitious enthusiasm combined with the determination to be in at the death, whoever or whatever is dying." Prone to laugh the world off in one breath, to succumb helplessly to it in the next, he characteristically concludes his final contribution to Letters from Iceland:

Our prerogatives as men

Will be cancelled who knows when;

Still I drink your health before

The gun-butt raps upon the door.

Less capable of high jinks, less disposed to trifle with ideas of doom, Poet Auden throughout his travels takes an English Gentleman's slightly proprietary interest in good nature and good sense wherever he may find them. Among the Icelanders he finds considerable good nature and a general sanity too unmitigated to be of much current use to a loyal inhabitant of contemporary Europe. But Poet Auden is not so loyal to Europe as to deny the notion—suggested by the sight of Icelanders clumsily gallivanting at a country fair—that plain human nature is the essential thing to be loyal to:

Isn't it true however far we've wandered

Into our provinces of persecution

Where our regrets accuse, we keep returning

Back to the common faith from which we've all dissented,

Back to the hands, the feet, the faces?