The call of the wild
Psst! Heard the one about the Frightful- ly Grand Writer and the Terribly Famous Actress? FGW lives in Italy, dividing her time between one of the less Blairised cor- ners of Tuscany and a flat in Rome. She is notoriously iffy with interviewers (though not exactly shy of attention) and has brought sulking at fancied offences, that favourite pastime of expat Brits with over- much time and money, to a fine art. TFA, who has a little cottage in the same neck of the woods, never having met FGW, found herself summoned to the August Presence in Trastevere. Should she take a little something? What better than a bottle of the virgin oil from her own olives? Amid Roman splendours FGW holds out a queenly digit, but the smile freezes as TFA innocently proffers the cloudy green essence. 'Well, I expect the servants will like it,' says Our Authoress with gelid dis- taste, as if rubber gloves were in order. What happened next, as Shakespeare says, `more suits it you to think than I to speak of.
I was reminded of this story when, run- ning a duster over the tomes the other night, I took down a copy of Letters from Iceland, the travel book jointly written by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. For 30 years this has been my equivalent of the green olive oil. Okay, maybe I wasn't quite as rude in my acceptance of it (as a birth- day present, what's more), but then, a callow undergraduate, I hadn't developed the species of brass neck which apparently derives from writing a dozen successful novels. On the shelf, however, it remained, a brand-new ten-and-sixpenny example of what in those days Faber, mistaking pom- posity for highmindedness, referred to as `paper-covered editions', only rescued from periodic library epuration by my supersti- tious dread of what happens if you give away what others give to you.
Letters from Iceland is often dismissed by writers on either poet as a mere mishmash scrambled together to fulfil a publisher's brief. As it happened, the Faber commis- sion arrived months after Auden, fired with sudden yearnings for the Nordic saga world of his childhood, decided to join a Bryanston school biology field-trip setting off for the geysers and glaciers in the sum- mer of 1936. After several weeks of jaunt- ing by pony from farm to farm, playing rummy and the harmonium and living off dried fish — 'the tougher kind tastes like toe-nails and the softer kind like the skin of the soles of one's feet' — he was joined in Reykjavik by MacNeice, apparently the perfect travelling companion, 'funny, observant, tolerant and good-tempered'.
The two poets had apparently viewed the trip as an opportunity to acquire some dis- tance, both from their personal and profes- sional lives and from a worsening European political situation which seemed to require increasingly intense commitment from anyone inclined to take themselves seriously as a writer. Though Iceland in the end failed to offer the required measure of detachment, it furnished instead the mate- rials for a travel book which, in terms of quirkish, one-off originality and entertain- ment even for those with no particular han- kering after high latitudes, has never been surpassed.
For, of course, Letters from Iceland is the ragbag that we take it for, and the better because of that. The old Christmas stock- ing analogy was seldom so well applied. On the topmost layer lies a little feint at the more orthodox species of guidebook in the shape of a chapter headed baldly 'For Tourists' in which entries such as 'The Einar Jonsson museum is not for the fastid- ious' and the evocation of Hakarl, half-dry, rotten shark - This is white inside with a prickly horn rind outside, as tough as an old boot. Owing to the smell, it has to be eaten out of doors. It is shaved off with a knife and eaten with brandy. It tastes more like boot polish than anything else I can think of — render the Iceland experience simply irresistible.
A shameless trawl through the writings of earlier wanderers in `Sagaland' is dedi- cated cheekily to that most doggedly undertravelled of the poets' Oxford con- temporaries, John Betjeman. The Viking Ketil Flatnose, wishing 'to that place of fish may I never come in my old age', jostles Sir Richard Burton's characteristic reflection that here ichthyophagy and idleness must do much to counterbalance the sun-clad power of chastity', the ominous pronounce- ment by an unnamed Nazi that 'fiir uns Island ist das Land' and the excited discov- ery by Madame Ida Pfeiffer, doubtful that insects could survive the climate, of 'two wild bees which she carried off in spirits of wine'. Anything like a straightforward log of the expedition is confined to a couple of letters addressed by Auden to his mother in Birmingham, in the first of which he acknowledges that 'a travel book about unconnected places becomes simply a record of a journey, which is boring'. As if to underline the almost missionary subver- siveness of Letters from Iceland, the various excursions with the Bryanston school party to Thingvellier, seat of the ancient Ice- landic parliament, or the hot springs of Hveravellirk, 'a real witches' laundry with the horizontal trailers of steam blowing through the mist', are retailed by 'Hefty to Nancy', a gushing schoolgirl barely able to keep pace with her impressions across 40 unparagraphed pages. The whole piece is unascribed and, since all the boys change sex and their biology master becomes `Margery Greenhalge', we are led to accept this as an early essay in camp of a sort Auden learned to indulge more freely under the tutelage of Chester Kalman, though, given the book's general air of polymorphous perversity, the author might just as well have been the unabashedly het- erosexual MacNiece.
It is the various poems included which give Letters from Iceland its ultimate — well what exactly? Significance? Allure? Raison d'être? Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron', in four instalments mixing professional apolo- gia with hints of autobiography, creates a leitmotif of cheerful self-confidence. MacNeice's 'Eclogue from Island', on the other hand, gritty, inexorable, sardonic, with sledgehammer lines like 'I was the doomed tough, disaster kept me witty', or the encapsulation of modern Ireland as `shooting straight in the cause of crooked thinking', underlines a belief that at the end of his holiday ramble there is a con- temporary world of responsible utterance to which both poets must sooner or later return.
Icelandic distance, if not exactly lending enchantment to the view of gathering storm clouds in Germany and Spain, had enhanced both poets' ecstasy at living in interesting times. This is what makes Letters from Iceland a nonsuch, indeed a nonpareil, veritable green olive oil among 20th-century travel books. And it's still in print, what's more.
Jonathan Keates
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