In 1936, W H Auden spent a summer in Iceland with his friend and fellow poet Louis MacNeice. The letters and poems they wrote that summer and sent home to Richard Crossman and Christopher Isherwood, among others, offer not only a fascinating record of their own youthful enthusiasms and obsessions but also a record of Iceland itself, a country which was then perhaps the most isolated, impoverished and introverted in Europe.
For the adolescent Auden, Iceland was “holy ground”: a landscape of mystery and dreams. When he finally arrived there, at the age of 29, the reality he encountered “verified his dreams”, but there were infinite irritations. In his letters home, Auden mocked the mediocrity and shabbiness of the architecture, the gloom of the locals, and the awful food – the bitter soups, the dried fish, the overcooked mutton and, a speciality, the rotten shark pickled in sour milk. This was a time of great upheaval in Europe – the civil war had begun in Spain, Hitler was ascendant – but Auden could discover little of what was happening elsewhere in the world. “Reykjavik,” he wrote, “is the worst possible sort of provincial town as far as amusing oneself is concerned, and there was nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence.”
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