Letters From Iceland

Although I have never been there, Iceland has been the cause of the only two flights I have ever missed.

The first time Iceland tripped me up was in May 2010 when the Eyjafjallajökull eruption and its ensuing ash cloud grounded my flight (not strictly missed, therefore) from Portugal to Ireland. We had flown there without problem, the volcano having died down after its initial April eruption, but then the wind turned from the prevailing south-westerly to the less-likely-for-the-time-of-year northerly, and we were stuck. Bah, Iceland!

The second time Iceland caused me trouble was just a few weeks ago, on Christmas Eve, when Letters from Iceland, an 87-year-old book by W.H. Auden & Louis MacNeice, had me so distracted that I sat by my gate, oblivious to my fellow passengers boarding, and let the plane take off without me.

It’s not that Letters from Iceland is a page turner, it’s more of a page-dweller and obviously I was in a dwelling mood. There are only so many times you can read the longest word in Icelandic inside your head before you must – I mean must – have a go at saying it aloud. Airports sit high on the list of places where it is acceptable to speak aloud to oneself, travellers being so self-absorbed (at least this one was) that they are oblivious (mostly) to the behaviour of others, oblivious even to boarding flights. The word I was compelled to speak aloud was: Haestarjettarmalaflutunesmanskifstofustulkonutidyralykill –– which, according to the book, means a latch-key belonging to a girl working in the office of a barrister. I kept losing my place mid-word and starting again. Time was moving on, people were boarding, I was tripping over the pronunciation of fifty-seven consecutive letters.

What brought me to the book in the first instance was a sleepless night, late December, listening to a World Service news bulletin on a volcanic eruption in Iceland. I was fascinated by the report of her boiling, bubbling, bursting, spewing scalding orange lava in the ultimate non-verbal demonstration of ‘I told you so’ after thousands of small quakes had, for weeks, whispered of something more dramatic to come. I lay there feeling a sense of relief that explosion, fire and destruction was, for once, born of nature, not of man.

Two days later I was in the Poetry Library where, prompted by the eruption, I borrowed Letters from Iceland, a collaborative work by the poet friends who had, in 1936, persuaded Faber to commission them to go north, observe, reflect, and write. The title is misleading. Whilst it contains some letters (in verse to Lord Byron, dead, in verse and in prose to friends, alive), Letters from Iceland is a relatively unstructured miscellany of wisdom, wit and observations about the island, some pithy, some dull, some acerbically funny and some ridiculous, like the inclusion of a list of Icelandic proverbs, including: “Pissing in his shoe keeps no man warm for long.”

Auden and MacNeice are drawn to the austerity of the north without much of a plan, as this early entry shows:

“So I came here to the land the Roman’s missed,

Left for the Irish saint and the Viking colonist.

But what am I doing here? Qu’allias-je faire?

Amongst these volcanic rocks and this grey air?” (Letters to Iceland, Chapter III, Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard.)

From what I read, they drank a lot of coffee, ate bad food, Auden got a stinking cold, they went for lots of hikes in wet mists, and drove slowly on bumpy roads. They also struggled to work out what to write, how to structure it, and how to distinguish theirs from other works. Auden said this of his dilemma: “In the bus to-day I had a bright idea about this travel book. I brought a Byron with me to Iceland, and I suddenly thought I might write him a chatty letter in light verse about anything I could think of, Europe, literature, myself. This letter in itself will have very little to do with Iceland, but will be rather a description of an effect of travelling in distant places which is to make one reflect on one’s past and one’s culture from the outside. I hope my idea will work, for at the moment I am rather pleased with it. I attribute it entirely to my cold. It is a curious fact how often plain or slight illness stimulates the imagination. The best poem I have written this year was written immediately after having a wisdom tooth out.” (Letters from Iceland, Auden & MacNeice.)

Into these paragraphs, I read Auden’s self-doubt, that he, like every other writer, had to constantly search for means of accessing creativity, new ways of turning over stones and hoping something interesting might be lurking underneath.

When I get to a section called Hetty to Nancy, correspondence from the former to the latter, I rather lose track. Where did these women come from? Are they real? Or, if Auden had been able to pack Lord Byron into his haversack, then could he have stuffed in any number of imagined characters and brought them along too? I freewheel, go with it, enjoy seeing the wilds of Iceland through the eyes of two intrepid young (imagined) English women who are perhaps more plain talking than the poets. “In the centre of Iceland there are only three kinds of scenery – Stones, More Stones and All Stones. The third type predominated to-day. The stones are the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong colour, and too many of them. They are not big enough to impress and not small enough to negotiate. Absolutely un-picturesque and absolutely non-utilitarian. Masie was disgusted. She said it was like after a party which no one had tidied up.” (Letters from Iceland, Hetty to Nancy.)

Meanwhile, back at Christmas Eve, I manage, remarkably easily, to book myself onto the next flight and not to miss it. It is the other side of Christmas before I finish the book, reading MacNeice’s poetic epilogue, made up of dark interior thoughts he writes from the quiet of Hampstead, prescient of what lies ahead for the world, grateful for the break they have had, sensible to the necessity of stepping out of the quotidian, in favour of taking one’s ease from the constant standing to attention, slackening, loosening, missing flights.

“Holidays should be like this,

Free from over-emphasis,

Time for soul to stretch and spit

Before the world comes back on it.”

	Epilogue for W.H. Auden, by Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland.